Weeknotes

It wasn’t an easy week, but it really left like progress was made … ⚡ - Monday, was one of those rare days where my Teams went into offline mode, my meetings were cleared (mostly) and I sent the day working on a few of my individual contributor activities. Most of this was some content for Project-R but I have to say, as I have mentioned in a previous weeknote, writing is an act of understanding. I thought I was facing a day or writing down well understood things out of my head and onto the page, however the process certainly raised some questions and now I have one or two things to go and get answers for. ...

A week of two halves … 🗃️ - I started the week, returning to my previous work of change catalogues. The main aim being to ensure we don’t have any gaps, that all the things we manage have at least one known, standard change. There are a few gaps and it’s a bigger job than I was expecting but given it’s impact to all our customers it’s a useful exercise. Still work to be done over the next few weeks on this. ...

“I learn in pictures, but I understand in words” … ⛯ - I spend most of the week working on further portfolio writing, trying to get the first draft document completed before it goes off for further technical review and branding next week. The week concluded with the document done, and I’m pretty proud of the 15k words of it’s contents. I learn quite a bit a long the way in putting it together and I already have plenty of ideas for Vol #2. ...

Project-R continues to be a significant theme of my weeks, however this week was mostly focused on ensuring the best service experience so I can’t complain too much about that. I will however complain about having to give the best version of myself while it’s 27+ degrees in rooms without air conditioning. 🥵 📄 - My week started working on Project-R working with the customer of their service design document. This is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. The purpose is to take what’s in the contract, which can be seen as the red-lines of the service and start having deeper conversations about what they want the experience to look and feel like. It mostly involves conversations about scenarios, edge cases, previous experiences and KPIs. All of this then gets written down in a document that is shared and can be updated over time as both parties learn to work together. ...

This week was a week of things that help build the future. 🪂 - Tuesday I was meeting a customer in Manchester. It was a sales meeting, but one to a very technical audience so very much no B*S. It was a session that could have stalled the relationship just as easily as it could have extended it. It didn’t go exactly as expected but we walked away with not one, but two opportunities. Just reminds me that sometimes despite hard work and plenty of relationship building, a touch a luck also helps. ...

I can already tell that June is going to be a busy one with lots of content, lots of collaboration and me writing even more words in even more places. ☁️ - I spent some time this week discussing our IaC set-up this week, except this time it was about our VMware private cloud environment. I go back and forth on the value of IaC (I almost wrote a blog a few weeks ago on its decline) and there has certainly been less attention, from us and from customers, in managing private cloud with IaC. Well we’ve been pushing this forward as part of bringing consistency across our services. I have some good meetings with the team this week discussing all the edge cases and how we handle them. ...

Some weeks there isn’t a theme, just a grab bag of vaguely interesting stuff happens … ⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeknotes, you’ll know I’m pretty good at being reflective. I think I generally have a pretty fair and balanced view of myself and my performance so I wasn’t really expecting too much out of my appraisal. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a more positive response than I had judged myself again - which was a nice mid-week boost. I feel I’ve worked pretty hard this year on a number of professional and personal fronts and it was nice to have that acknowledged. Next onto goals. ...

Training, reflecting, planning, nurturing … 🦩 - Sales training. One day in the London office and one day in the Leeds office. Working with out sales teams on how to sell our cloud portfolio as a solution sell alongside other portfolio areas. Also, reviewing some competitors and some example sales scenarios. I always enjoy doing these sorts of things because it gives me a temperature check for our sales teams and I always get new questions and sometimes things I hadn’t considered. ...

A week of two halves for sure. One of those weeks where you look back and go “wait, did that just happen?” 🇦🇪 - The most of this week was all about the Dubai FinTech Summit. I flew out on Sunday for this event we were sponsoring to talk to people on our stand. I was also there to do some panel discussions, community interviews and some dinners with some customers. I’d been preparing for a week for this but I really wasn’t prepared for the experience. Dubai is like nothing else - in culture, in opportunity, in inspiration. Landed home on Wednesday and I’ll be thinking about and discussing this for weeks to come. I’ll be writing up a specific blog post on this shortly. Edit: (19-Apr-2025) I have added the post on this event here ...

Where did this week go? A mixed bag of all sorts and then it was the weekend. 🪢 - Had all the team leaders for tech practice, together F2F this week. It was brief but it’s nice to see everyone together discussing employee feedback and plans for the next FY. 💡 - This week I started a series of career coaching sessions with a colleague who feels they are in a bit of rut. This is my opportunity to expand on my coaching experience, using existing tools and techniques from my own coaching experience. I’m not often on this side of the coaching table in such a formal/structured manner. On this occasion I’ll get to explore if this is something I want to do more of in my career all the while helping someone else with theirs. ...