This week is very much defined by Project-R2. There are certainly lots of other things happening around the edges, but this project dominates at the moment. I’m not actually all that bothered by that, it’s a customer where they are investing in the right things, have money to spend and are pushing us in all the right directions to be better. Exhausting but exciting stuff.

  • 🏹 - The week started with an all-day set of on-site workshops the Project-R2 customer and project team. A kick-off for them (we’d had our internal one a few weeks before) and some workshops on additional projects and innovation. The conversations were really rich and in-depth. Migrations, security improvements, AI roll-outs and application development. If Project-R2 wasn’t big enough on it’s own already there was a small mountain of innovation to do and plenty of areas for me to have some further internal conversations about. I came away enthused by the possibilities. The day closed out with a nice roof-top dinner and drinks with the team overlooking the impressive views of central London - despite having worked here for most of my career, the awe from this place is never lost on me.

  • 🧑🏻 - Much of the rest of the week was spent in interviews for Project-R2. Building a brand new team, specific for a customer is a new thing for me and it’s certainly been a while since I’ve been hands-on interviewing. It’s been refreshing and enlightening actually and despite there being people that won’t make it, I actually enjoyed meeting a lot of new people. I think the most difficult and unique challenge of this is I am having to build a team with the context of how they will work together without having the anchor of existing team mates. Onboarding a team in one go is also going to be the next interesting challenge over the coming months.

  • ☁️ - I’ve had a few conversations again this week about what’s next for private cloud. It’s become a much more interesting conversation now that people have realised public cloud can be expensive, now that buying new hardware has become expensive, now that Broadcom is more expensive and now that people want the public cloud tools and experience in data centres in their own country. Private hosting and private cloud management has been a pretty stable service offering of MSPs for over 20 years, but now it’s certainly got some new colours again and I’m starting to work on those enhancements.

  • 📃 - Product portfolios are rarely perfect and I spend a lot of time considering our gaps and how to improve them. I had some focus time this week to dive a little deeper on this. How to ensure we have all the professional services in place to take customers from Service A to Service B. How to make sure all our services have all the content they need to be transparent, build trust and make them easier to sell. Also, how make our portfolio less overwhelming as it expands over time. All tricker problems that this paragraph makes them sound.

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