Weeknotes

My last working week before Christmas meant, looking back and looking forward. I’m not going to spend too much time looking back during this weeks weeknote, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for my blogpost on that so this week has more been about preparations, hand-overs and looking forward. 🖊️ - I spent a decent amount of time this week writing down my strategy for the cloud practice. This not not about some manger aggrandising but something that is important for the wider business to understand the things we’ll be focusing on as a team (and consequently things we won’t be). It’s actually something that has been an ask from the engineers themselves for some time, that they would like to have a clear communicated strategy, something that focuses them all towards a goal. Hopefully what I am working on will achive that. This week was the first draft. It will take a first pass through the other directors and then the team leads before a final version is presented to everyone else. This is not the first time I’ve written such a thing and I base my approach on the famous (infamous?!) AWS 6-pager format. While I am not dogmatic about the approach, having something in written form backed by real data I do believe is important. So let’s see if it passes the first sniff test. ❔ - I was pretty light on my Project-R2 contributions this week. I was only a contributing member for this weeks workshop and preparations were underway for presentations while I am away. I did however spend some time reading and responding the the first batch of questions. I always like this bit because the questions often tell you more about a company and their current experience than anything they might say directly. Mostly strightforward stuff, but their have been a few questions that have required some thinking. Even if this whole process isn’t successful there have been a lot of things a long the way that will result in service improvements over the next year. 🧰 - I had a session this week on tooling where two teams got to come together and agree on a joint roadmap. There are lots of things we’re working on at the moment and lots of tools we’re likely to replace in the near future as we’re scaling beyond what they are capable of. There are some fundimental things however that are under the microscope - monitoring, cmdb discovery, finops. All of thes will result in further good deep-dive conversations in the new year. What was good though was the re-affirm that our princiapls of collaboration and build the interface build the tools still applies. 🎄 - So, this is indeed my last working week of the year which means a bit of rushed end to the week, but fret not I will still be writing weeknotes during the Christmas period. I still have a lot of reading to do so I’ll still have a few insights to share. I’ll also be working on my end-of-year reflection post so there is that to look forward to. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Another big Project-R2 week this week, but also really getting to know my new team much better and thinking about the future. 🗣️ - The result of last weeks cruch time meant that a few of my 1:1s had to be pushed back a few days. I hate having to move 1:1s because I respect the time I spend with people and the mutual value of the sessions, however in this case, even if I could have shuffled things I don’t think I would have been in the right mental state to support them the way they deserved to be supported. The knock-on effect of moving the sessions was the first two days of the week being jam-packed with 1:1s. Taking on a new team is not easy but I’ve certainly found it easier this time and I’ve learnt my lesson by giving myself 15m breaks between sessions that ensure I’m always bringing the right energy and focus to each session. 👔 - Project-R2 didn’t stop this week. With the RFP submitted last week, Thursday had a 4-hour presenation so the rest of the week was preparing for that session. Thankfully, it went very well. The debrief session back at the office overlapped with the start of the Christmas party and a couple of celebration drinks later and I was done. Emotionally drained, but the peak has been climbed. Friday has another presentation, but I was remote and it was significantly easier once we knew what to expect. 🔮 - Friday was also a little bit of time to start thinking about my new role and thinking towards subsequent years had in store. Next week, I’ll be putting pen to paper on my cloud strategy, thinking about travel to other Claranet group countries to collaborate on some shared initatives and also what my role and the practice might bring if aquisitions were on the table in the next 18-months (nothing yet - but the market looks interesting). 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Crunch week. No avoiding it, this was a tough one. 3 days in the office, one evening working into the early hours of morning but it’s over now and I can take a couple of days rest before the next stage starts. Did I mention it’s only 2 weeks until I’m on leave for Christmas?! ⚰️ - Project-R2 is out the door. The RFP response got completed with superhearo manuvers from several people working right up until the submission deadline. It was the reason for my office visits and took over 95% of my week. There are mixed feelings about this one. Scary/Exciting if we win it, but also Sad/Releaved if we don’t. Either way, next week follows with the presentation stage right until January - more work ahead. 👐🏼 - The only other notable highlight this week was that I had a good session meeting my team leaders face-to-face for the first time. It was important to spend this time together and hear there thoughts, opinions and prirorities. There is a good mix of voices in the room and I think with the right structure we can really make a big change. Genuinely excited. It’s this team and this new role that is keeping my motivated when everything else is a big struggle. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week has been the start of crunch time. Lead for Project-R, author for Project-R2 and now Cloud Practice Director has meant long hours with context switching fuelled by caffeine and some good work collegues. I say crunch time because I’m doing this with full awareness that is is short term (a few weeks - not a sustained position) and what comes out the other side will hopefully be worth it. Despite the support (at work and at home) and the shining light at the end of the tunnel I’m not sure it’s made it any easier. It’s been a rough one. ...

Sometimes there are weeks that really push my mental resliance, testing how far I can stretch my abilities to multi-task, prioritise and still ship things. This is one of those weeks. I can confidently say I left nothing on the table. 🪆 - Project-R2 continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Asked to build a dedicated team for the oppertunity, it really means looking at building an MSP inside an MSP. Engieering, Support, HR, Finance, all elements are being considered. Good exercise, but getting in all written down and actually filling out the RFP responses continues to drain and be impacted by the occassional executive dysfunction. 🗓️ - A highlight of the week was a single session with a customer, where they discusse their project roadmap for the year and I had the oppertunity to discussed our roadmap and how it aligns with what they are trying to do. I do these types of sessions all the time but it’s rare to get such great insight and transparency from a customer and both parties left very statisfied. 🧢 - Last week I mentioned that new organisational changes had been announced. On Wednesday, after candidates for the new Director of Cloud Practice dropped out of the running, I was asked to step into the role on an interim-basis. While I had done a similiar role and with an almost identical title four years ago, this role is a bigger role and comes with the budget responsibility that my previous role did not. I was asked to come into the role on a interim basis with the longer-term intention of taking on the role if both I and the company can make sufficient provision over the next few months for some of my existing responsibilities. It is an exciting oppetunity and I look forward to getting back in the weeds with the cloud engineers and the customers they are supporting. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

A week of R&R requires some much needed R&R… 🧯 - Well the week started with an escalation on Project-R. Nothing really drastic but a combination of small problems which has led to an unhappy customer. Thankfully both sides had planned for such an eventuality and we had a well documented structure in place so we just had to follow the playbook. A good test I guess, even it does mean my calls will be starting at 8am for the coming days. A good reminder that even in projects you should plan for failure and have open discussions early on about how to handle it. 🦾 - After receving the RFP for Project-R2 at the tail end of last week, I decent amount of my week was further reading and planning. Lots of questions to ask and assumptions we’ll need to make but it’s definitly an interesing oppertunity. Lots of people are worried about it though, so I’ll be taking on the emotional labour of getting everyone though the process over the next few weeks. If we win this one (and it’s a big if) then it’s one of those “once a year” projects that will keep up growing. Exciting but exhausting. 💬 - It was announced this week that there will be come upcoming changes in the business. Not impacting me or my role (so dodging that bullet this time) but we’re moving to a more practice/business-unit based org structure. I think this is a very postivie step forward. The discussions I had this week were about looking back on previous models and org structures including what worked well and what didn’t and how we can make this chance sucessful. I’ll less cynical this time around and feeling pretty confident about this change and it setting up the right foundations. 🏉 After a long week, on Friday we travelling into London to watch the Harlequins Women vs Gloucester Women at the Twickenham Stoop. Only my second ruby game and I absolutely loved it. My daughter also got to meeet england players Ellie Killdunne and Zoe Aldcroft, which was big highlight. 🍰 Last weekend was my mother’s 70th birthday so this weekend as an additional treat we decided to go to Fortnum and Mason for some afternoon tea. Great way to round off the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth oppertunity. 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the london tube map design prinicpals). This started as a suggestion from marketing as a good visual to present what is now a long and quite complex portfolio of services. What it turned into was a great model to have conversations about customer journeys, portfolio gaps and service transitions. This week I managed to finalise the first version of the model and I’m pretty pleased with it. Looking forward to gettting feedback on it from sales, from wider business stakeholders and more importantly from customers. 🧰 - More time was spent this week building out the roadmap for internal systems (known as Epic 2). These are changes to support greater process efficiency, more automation in delivery and to support more future enhancements to our customer portal - giving more capability and more transparancy. I am really excited about this and the next six-months is going to some really great things. 🔍 - We also started a review of our monitoring capability. This took the form of looking at three levels - component-level (do we have any gaps?), application-level (how we bring more consistency of application awareness across our customers) and experience-level (how to we bring in our network and experience monitoring into the mix and how do we enhance it). We now have some actions at all levels and over the next month we’ll start to build this into a roadmap. I’m also starting to consider how much of this we expose to our customers as well. 📨 - Friday was a little visit to my old employer Mimecast. A heady compination of both problem solving, stratric planning and nostalgia. Claranet have had a partnership with Mimecast for many years (itself a long story) but this was the first time I had engaged with them directly. The hope is to turn this partnership into more of strategic one - but there is a long way to go on both sides for that. ...

Another week that was completely unlike the previous ones, with my having lots of different hats on from sales, finance and engineer. Certain keeps things interesting and a few new things to build on over the next couple of months. 📋 - I’ve been bending my brain thinking, planning and learning about knowledge management and document management. At the current time, like many other MSPs our knowledge management is diverse and inconsistent. This week I am been on a deep-dive to re-design our approach; thinking about documents, versioning, approvals, docuemntation and code, documentation in git repots, documentation in wikis and how to handle keeping things up-to-date where there is complex representations like tables and diagrams as well as text. I am in the process of writing this all down so that others can contribute to the new strategy. More plans to come. 🎙️ - In the middle on the week, I delivered two sessions of a webinar on our portfolio. It covered both the topic of my previous blog on why I hate product roadmaps, Claranet’s alternative to roadmaps and some of our upcoming focus areas. There has been quite a bit of prep for this over the previous week and I enjoyed working with my collegue Tom to present this - the back of forth always fun and making each session and slightly new experience. It’s been a while since I last delivered a webinar - I forgot how anxitious I get in the build up but also how much I enjoy it in the moment. 📈 - One of the lessons learned from working on large projects (like Project-R) is that how the project is constructed into deliverables, milestones and invoicing. It is a critical aspect and just as important as the solution itself. The middle of the week I spent re-viewing this again and ensuring that there are structures in play that are fair to both parties and that this is something we can take into future projects. ⛅ - I ended the week with an internal project kick-off for working on IBM Cloud. Yep - IBM. In a few months, when we have progressed more with it, I will do a little write up on the rationale here, but the sort description is that IBM have asked us to support the platform and they have lots of customers they are trying to keep on IBM Cloud or move to IBM Cloud as part of existing enterprise licensing agreements. This is a similar to the Oracle playbook of a few years ago. This is not just a tactical/oppertunitstic move on our part but also part of a wider strategy to focus more on enterprise customers. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week as been a week that has flown by in a series of small meetings and todo list items. I have been operating at about 40% for most of the week as I continue to fight off the seasonal cold (yes, I should take some sick days but you know I won’t because I still have iches to scratch). 🛝 - This week has been definitly been about all the small things (say it ain’t so!). I don’t just mean lots of tiny 15 minute meetings or 5 minute emails to fire off, but I mean that it’s been a week where the mistakes have been small but also the wins. These days I’m mostly involved in the larger projects and these can suffer with what I call “death by a thousand cuts” - a project that doesn’t fail in some big bang catastrophe but very slowly over time due to lots of tiny mitakes. A project can go from profitable to unprofitable like a leaky kitchen tap that no one really notices. The flip side to this is “growth by a thousand steps” - tweak a agent, improve a process, add an automated business rule. These things on their are often forgettable improvements, easily missed by focusing on the next thing. Well this week has had plenty of both of these extremes - I now have a long long list. 🚀 - We’ve been invested in developing our own tooling to support our engineers for several years now. The purpose of this tooling is to give us the best insight into our managed customers and to make migration and modernisation activities as easy as possible (so we can do more of them). This week saw another release from our team, enhancing our quality assurance and making sure that all the clouds we suppport have an equal set of features. We’re also working of some amazing AI tooling behind the scenes - but that’s for another day. I’m very proud of the team behind this and see how the tooling has matured as also it’s engagement. 💡 - A small other note this week - I’ve been back to doing some digging into some ideas and topics that iterest me. At the moment I’m spending time reading on some of the other cloud platforms (oracle cloud, ibm cloud, OVH) and also thinking about Operational Technology - both networks and security. Lots of ideas and scribbled notes. Nothing for now, but maybe a few things for the near future. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Another week with an office visit and another week where I feel connected to all corners of the business. However I ended the week with whatever bug is doing the rounds 😷 📈 - Another week with a big emphasis on sales. A combination of account planning, renewals and a few roadmap conversations with customers meant that overall it felt engaging, like we had some exciting plans and that some of our customers will continue to push us. 🎟️ - My time in the office also allowed me to be part of another set of folks going through their induction to the business. Having given my usual 25 mins on the products, our capabilities and the company, I got the usual around of questions. The questions are the reason I do it. We often hire other people from the industry and people with naturally ask questions in the context of where they have come from and their prior experince. This is great, because while answering their question I am also learning from them about their previous companies, products they are familair with and a little about the people asking those questions. I will try and follow-up with the people asking the most interesting questions to get even deeper insight. 🌱 - This week I spent more time with some of our project management team discussing ways to improve what they do and provide more context to the day-to-day decisions they make. I massively admire project managers, but they have a level of organisation that I don’t naturally have. I’ve always surrounded myself with people that have this skill. In the sessions this week we discussed giving them better visibility of the overall finacnes of the projects and also the downstream impacts on movements in project tasks. We worked on improving dashboards and automating some of their worst admin tasks. I enjoyed really getting into the weeds with this team and it gave me a new found empathy for what they do. 🔜 - With a focus on quarterly updates to our portfolio radar, this week has been focused on gathering and discussing all the latest updates. Plenty of new things going in and some exciting new roadmap items. Some won’t quite make it this time around, but it’s been a good exercise and I’ve enjoyed all the discussions. I suspect we’ll release internally next week and to customers the week after, as per the previous agreed cadence. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...