This week has been a tough one. Busy, complicated, lots of things going on. With Project-R2 and what was then the pending acquisition of 6DG, I knew July was going to be a crunch time month and it’s turning out to be just that. This week was been a week of 12-hours days, fuelled by coffee and adrenalin. I have a certain set of skills like consuming content fast, holding lots of context in my head and producing content quickly that make me useful for these sort of periods but it can only occur in short bursts and I’m thankful for the pre-booked leave I have coming up at the beginning of August.

I’m not normally all that personal in these weeknotes but I think it’s important to speak about mental health and not hide behind metaphors or euphemism - recently my anxiety has been at an all time high. I don’t just mean that before-a-big-meeting anxiety (that’s pretty typical) I mean the come down from the adrenalin high anxiety that you can really feel in your body. I love my job and I think I’m pretty good at it, but when I’m standing in my garden with a tight chest, weak limbs that don’t want to stop moving and thoughts of work left undone which spiral around my head, one has to think that perhaps I need to break the pattern. I’ve coached and been coached out of these scenarios before, so maybe I need that again, or maybe I need to think more deeply about the pattern. One think about.

  • 🔵 - This week was my filled with my next series of introduction calls with 6DG folks. One aspect of an acquisition is that is can feel really corporate really quickly if your not careful. Lots of time can be spent on legals, contracts and customer relationships and the people can come second. That’s not something I want to happen in this case, so I’m spending time personally introducing myself to people 1:1 and finding a little bit about them. Obviously this is something that I can due because this is a relatively small acquisition but I’m glad of the opportunity because context matters.

  • 💻 - This week I also spent quite a bit of time going through corporate on-boarding activities. You know the type: phishing training, GDPR training, acceptable use etc. This was something I had to do for Project-R2, 6DG and also an annual refresh of some for Claranet. I felt like a new employee of three separate companies, which was an odd feeling, but game me some new sympathies. Also, it was interesting to compare/constrast the similar content from each organisation.

  • 🎟️ - This weeks Project-R2 update was really more of the same, lots of workshops and reading documentation. However this week I also spent a lot of time deep into ServiceNow - reporting, SLAs, tickets and problems. ServiceNow is often the beating heart of an IT team in large enterprises so it’s where you can get really good insight into operational maturity and find out where the skeletons are buried. Lots of notes, some lessons for Claranet also - mutual benefit.

📈 - This weeks stats:

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: