Weeknotes

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. ...

Sometimes there are weeks that really push my mental resilience, 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 opportunity, it really means looking at building an MSP inside an MSP. Engineering, 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 occasional executive dysfunction. ...

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 run-book. 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. ...

New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth opportunity. 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the London tube map design principals). 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 getting feedback on it from sales, from wider business stakeholders and more importantly from customers. ...

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, documentation and code, documentation in git repositories, 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. ...

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 itches to scratch). 🛝 - This week has been definitely 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 mistakes. 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 list. ...

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. ...

A week of lots of new things, lots of scribbled notes, a new office and making sure I prioritise the right things. ✨ - I’ve been writing about Project-R for a long time now and for project as long as this it is important to recognise the milestones along the way. This week we rolled out some improvements to our customer portal, based upon the feedback from this project. This is a big step because it’s something that shows just how big projects often cause an overall improvement to all customers. This one been the last of these, but we took a small moment to celebrate the first. ...

Lots of activity looking forward this week, covering all aspects of finance, product and strategy. 📈 - As a continuation from last week, this week included more finance review sessions. While I’m already familiar with the numbers, these session were a good opportunity for me to learn about how they are received and what data is important to the practice leads in their day-to-day operations. There were differences in each as to be expected but it the excitement and interest was obvious, proving that data doesn’t have to dull it just has to be relevant. ...