Weeknotes

This week has been, what I suspect is the calm before the storm. A week where I got to focus on some of my individual contributions and enabling activities and less of sales and endless meetings. 🗣️ - I started the week presenting on our H1 highlights and H2 plans at our town hall. I always appreciate this bi-annual sessions, not just because of their inherently reflective nature but because of the company-wide Q&A we get at the end. You get questions from all different contexts across the business and at all different levels of perspective from the immediate/tactical to the long-term/strategic. Great fun. ...

An old boss of mine used to talk about change like moving a boat on the ocean - you just make small waves but eventually it will turn. This week felt like one of those weeks, taking a few small actions here and there know that it will take a while to see the outcome but it’s worth doing anyway. 👔 - Project-R2, is into the next phase. My involvement has been less as a active participant this week and more as a guiding voice here and there. Thankfully, this means the time investment has been much less and I’ve really noticed the difference. After all these years I’m not sure why it still surprises me how difficult it really is to balance large projects and being a good manager. Thankfully this week a few other took up the mantle of this project, moving us into the due-diligence phase, so that I could spend more time with the team. ...

This week is the cold shower of real-life after the brief interlude of new year. Last week’s few days of relax and TV binge watching quickly forgotten by five days of back-to-back meetings and workshops. Not a lot of context switching thankfully, just a lot of work to be done on a small number of topics. Busy but not too stressful. I guess as first weeks back go, it could have been a lot worse. ...

🏠 - The week between Christmas and New Year is an odd one isn’t it. This is the time when I do a little as possible. I stay in, keep warm, and binge as much as is possible to binge with the scribble of notes as ideas emerge for me the re-read for work later. 📈 - This weeks stats: 144 minutes of podcasts 5,483 average weekly steps 102 book pages read (1984 - p203-305) 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

The week of Christmas always passes with the contradiction of flying past and feeling like the longest week. Family enjoyment all around. 📈 - This weeks stats: 377 minutes of podcasts 4,449 average weekly steps 53 book pages read (1984 - p149-202) 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: Bridgerton - S02 + S03 Amandaland Christmas Special Stranger Things - S02 A Ghost Story for Christmas - 2025

First week of my 3 weeks of leave, I have mostly been focused on … nothing much. Decompressing from a pretty stressful couple of months of work means that this week is binge watching lots of TV and movies, catching up on reading articles, white papers and some books and trying not too think about too much work. What that means is my background entertainment section below is larger than usual, I’ll be shortly adding a few more entries to /bookmarks and there I’ll be spending a day next week drafting one or two blog posts for the coming year. ...

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 blog post 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 is not about some manager 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 achieve 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. ...

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 crunch 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. ...

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 superhero manoeuvres 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/Relieved if we don’t. Either way, next week follows with the presentation stage right until January - more work ahead. ...

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 colleagues. I say crunch time because I’m doing this with full awareness that 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. ...