The first half of the week I was on the annual family camping trip and for the first time, not actually looking at my email of teams messages while on leave. This meant that Wednesday hit me like a bus, with hundreds of emails and messages and a back-to-back day of meetings. A few escalations into the mix was the real cherry on the cake. Thankfully by Friday, I’d caught up and my stress levels much reduced. My overall mood remains positive.

  • ⛑️ - Customer escalations are never a pleasant thing to deal with, they mean we have failed and often in a very high-visible and impactful way. I had two escalations this week, one about a project and one about a recent incident in our managed services - two separate customers. Both the result of complex issues in our delivery (as both of these are complex enterprise-level customers) with multi-country elements and fortunately both with a relatively easy fix. Being any kind of service provider is a complex business and issues do happen, my focus has always been to follow through to the real causes of the issue long after the issue has been resolved for the customer.

  • 📓 - Project-R2 continues along again this week with knowledge sharing sessions. Done well, these go beyond the “show we how you do this”-type work and help to identify process gaps, quality gaps, undocumented things, and a long list of possible improvements. While my colleagues are using these sessions to focus on the key handover requirements - I’m scribbling notes on service improvements and possible automation opportunities so that we’re able to show value very quickly.

  • ⏲️ - If Project-R2 wasn’t fun enough, this week we already submitted a bid for our next R2-sized opportunity. Assuming we win (and our hit-rate recently strongly suggests we might) then this will land in delivery early part of next year. For double the fun - a previously delayed Azure migration project of significant size and scope is also being brought back from the dead around a similar time frame. Better get R2 moving to give the rest of the team enough time to focus on these two monsters.

📈 - This weeks stats:

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: