Weeknotes

Where did this week, go? My calendar was full but staring at it’s multi-coloured hues I couldn’t say for certain what my output was. What I can say, is that this week was more about keeping the rails on the track and supporting all of those around me. 🧯 - Monday did not start on a good note, I had two escalations in my inbox to deal with and well, that pretty much set the tone for the whole week. Frustratingly while both different in their problem and from different customers they both had very similar themes: we didn’t do X on time, we don’t trust you have the skills to do X. While resolved by the end of the week, it was a cold-shower moment that it doesn’t matter how good your service is or your skills are, if you your CX falls below the standard then trust gets chipped away and it takes 10x as long to fix that as it does the problem that caused it. ...

A 4 day week this week, in which everyone does a full weeks work in four days due to the bank holiday. I would still like this to be a permanent fixture one day, however so fingers crossed for that. I would say this week has a very “enterprise” feel about it, more documents, more process, more conversations about very enterprise problems and enterprise products. 🧑‍🚒 - I’ve been working with our engineering teams on merging together a few internal documents into something external we are able to provide to customers about how we deliver operational resilience. This is backup, patching, disaster recovery, compliance. As you’d expect we have lots of documentation on this sort of thing, cover lots of different scenarios. By putting this all in one place under what we’re calling the “Operational Assurance Plan” we can have joined up conversations with our customer and build reassurance that we’ve covered all of their scenarios and that we practically know exactly how to deliver it. ...

While the theme of this week is mostly working through reading and drafting customer documents, I’ve been exploring a few back-to-basics things that will improve services for our customers. 🪛 - Like most MSPs we’re a big ServiceNow user. However, I’ll admit, despite having spent about 8 years using it almost daily I’ve only really started to explore all it’s features, all it’s modules and it’s it’s automation and workflow possibilities over the past few months. This week I started being a bit more deliberate about my learning/digging. Document management, vendor management, GRC, maintenance and blackout windows, business rules. Scribbling notes and scheduling demos. ...

Having a week and a half off work typically means consuming content and letting my mind wander. This week was no different and you’ll be able to notice from my usual weekly stats that I have certainly consumed more than my usual numbers. It was also been a week of odd jobs that let my mind wander and for ideas for form. I can image that the first few days back to work next week will involve turning all my scribbles in my note app and on random bits of paper into actions and more interesting content. ...

This week I am publishing the weeknote from my phone as I lay in a field on the annual family camping trip. Monday and Tuesday were still chaotic work days but the remainder has been some much needed down time. 🔎 - Monday was spent with teams reviewing some internal processes, with a key focus on adding more automation between our security, risk, problem and incident management processes. I’m excited to see some of these things come into effect because we’re seeing improvements to both customers and our front-line engineers. ...

This week definitely felt like a slower week, but perhaps that’s just a bad comparison to last week. I managed to deep-dive into a few technical areas I don’t usually touch and also take some time to step back and think about the next steps for the portfolio. 🏛️ - A few times this week I found myself in topics about standards, compliance or regulations. This came up first as part of Project-R, but then also in two additional calls with customers. This included GDPR (and the DPDPA), PCI:DSS and the riveting handbook that is the FCA regulations. While I don’t pretend to be an expert in these areas, they come up so frequently that I think our portfolio needs to highlight them a lot more than it does today. Good insight, much reflection. ...

This week turned out to be an unusually productive week. It was also a week where I was more in consume mode that production mode, spending more time reading and reviewing and less time writing than I am normally used to. This type of work is what has allowed a larger amount of treadmill steps this week that I would normally achieve, but it has also resulted in me having consistently more energy. ...

A new routines, a bit more energy, a bite more productivity and a few more ideas … 🏃🏻‍➡️ - If you’ve been paying attention for the past few weeks, you will have noticed that there has a marked decline in my step count since I acquired by manual treadmill. Well apparently this is quite common, but I was not happy about it. So I stated this week with a small change to my routine by getting up 1hr earlier to spend an extra hour on the treadmill, while watching something on Netflix, so I can get an extra 5k steps in. It’s been great, giving me a bit more of a boost before work and with the double-win of getting to watch a few more TV shows on my list. ...

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. ...