Weeknotes

More words, more films, more questions … 📜 Project-R continues to extract words from my brain like silvery strands from a Harry Potter memory charm. This week was a quick 10k words of contractual text describing our managed services. Definitions, obligations, we will do this, we may do this, we require you to do this other thing from time to time. I don’t know how lawyers do this every day - exhausting. Having said that I did spend some time writing a couple of use AI prompts, one which reviews my work and the other which drafts definitions for me. Not perfect to useful and certainly re-usable. ⚙️ I was also involved in a customer presentation on Tuesday which included demos as well as the usual barrage of questions. Having lots of questions I can understand, people want to know what they are buying, but it’s rare for customers to want to see demos of how we do what we do. I was thinking more about it as we were preparing for it and I really couldn’t understand why some customers want to see behind the curtain of a service they are buying and want to see how we deliver services to them and what tools we use. When was the last time you got on a call with your electricity company and asked - can you show me exactly how you get that power from the wind turbine to power my TV and can you show me all the tools? 🎥 - This weeks background entertainment: Usually my evening entertain in TV, however we had run out of things we wanted to watch so this weeks background entertainment was a string of films from the 90s - surprisingly many of which I had never actually seen before ...

A week of more paperwork but boosted by an all-too-brief office visit. 📜 Project-R continues to fill my week, I’m coming to terms with the fact at this project is going to be one projects upon which many other improvements hang-off from. I guess it’s sort of like having a development branch in your GitHub repo, where lots of stuff happens every day and then you cherry-pick the best bits for your main branch (that being the rest of the business in this very stretched analogy). Well, this week’s Project-R side-quest has been working on services descriptions - nothing new but making sure any relevant service descriptions are on the latest templates, any that have pending updates are completed and that Project-R get the best versions of these things included. 🏛️ I was in London for a Townhall session on Wednesday. Unlike in previous stages on my career I don’t go to these things to find out what’s going on, nor on this occasion was I presenting anything. This time I go to them to be in-person with everyone else. I find that on Townhall days that people have lots of questions or they ask questions in the session and it gives them momentum and ideas to ask more later. Any time I’m in person in an office I seem to be a magnet for people asking questions or asking for help and it’s my absolute pleasure. Also, Townhalls are very different in a private company than they are in a public company, you get to be more honest about what’s working well and what’s not, plus the questions are much more direct. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

📜 - With Project-R being a focus of last year, it continues at full steam this week with me supporting contracting and reviewing paperwork. As a technologist, you might think that spending my time on legal paperwork would be on the list of worst things I have to do, in fact it’s quite the opposite. It’s one of those times when you have to be really clear about what you do - especially if you’re having to define technical terms for non-technical folks. I have also found that this is the type of process where any gaps in services or pre-conceived assumptions really comes to the forefront so I always find this an excellent opportunity to test out really being able to define commitments and value and learn some things along the way. ⭕ - This week also including some time discussing Oracle again. I’ll admit my knowledge of the Oracle suit is pretty basic but I’ve explored OCI before and every couple of years the topic of doing more with Oracle (mostly for the Oracle database and OCI) comes up. This time it wasn’t either of those things but Primavera that drove the topic. So, I spend some time talking to our Oracle contacts and some internal folks with the “what if we did this?” question. Certainly not top of my list right now but one of those areas that I keep checking in on and I expect to become more and more important as our over average customer size gets larger. 👩‍🏫 - Last week I mentioned that I had spent some time thinking and writing down goals for the year (they will be published here very soon), well this week quite serendipitously, I had a external coaching session. A family friend of ours is undergoing a coaching apprenticeship and was looking for a few people to do some free sessions that she can use as part of her portfolio. Well, having done external coaching before and having got a lot of value from it, I thought this was great. It was a double-win for me. I got to help out a friend and also have a hour of time to go through my 2024 goals with someone else and get some ideas of how to improve them or make it more likely for them to be successful. I have two more sessions over the next 2 months, so I’ll be posted more about it in future weeknotes. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

Well the first week of the new year is thankfully a bit of a slow one with only two days back at work (almost everyone else off) and three days for some goal setting and tv binge watching. 🧹 - The start of the year, is one of those time when it feels appropriate to do a bit of a clean up. Perhaps it’s due to the large volume of rubbish from Christmas but it encourages me to throw away other things unused and to deep clean rooms to make space. There is also a phycological element that means a clean space puts you in the right head space to start the new year. 🎯 - I’m not one for setting new years resolutions but I certainly like to review goals and objectives and the start of the year seems the perfect time to do so. Nothing new or exciting this year - more building on the habits and patterns of last year which seems to have been going well so far. Having a split week between work and time off means that I’ve also had the opportunity to review both personal and professional goals at the time time and side-by-side. Following on from my process of putting things on this site and therefore out in public, I will be doing so soon with some of this material. 🏢 - Thursday and Friday were the first days back to work and with most other staff still on leave it was a nice slow start to the year and opportunity for a bit of planning and organising. My plan started with reviewing my scheduled meetings making sure I was spending the right about of time with the right people and more importantly how much face-time I was getting. I also did a bit of product planning, reviewing the roadmap and writing a new service description draft and a couple of RFPs. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

It’s Christmaaaaaaas! Well, that’s about it really and rightly so. The traditional large family events on the 26th and 27th - 20 people squeezed into our house. Managed to catch up on some reading and binged watched Bad Sisters. Expect a little more next week.

This week was barely a work week at all - Monday and Tuesday then off for the Christmas period. Despite that I certainly managed to get a few important things squeezed in to set me up in a good position for the new year. As is probably quite common, certainly for me, this week was all about planning and roadmap reviews. I started the week looking at our Customer Experience roadmap - this is the roadmap of services and improvements for all the foundational elements of our products and services - projects management, service management, ITIL managed services, collaboration. All of these things services and the direct touch-points with our customers and I’ve been spending a lot of time with our managed services team ensuring that all these services are the best they can be, that they are well written down and we’ve got good roadmap of all the improvements we want to make. I’m really excited for the things coming in this area. ...

Is it a new week or last week? You tell me. Honestly, this has certainly left like a week that has came rushing in on the tail of the previous week with most of the things I was working on continuation of what I had been working on previously. Obviously not everything I do can be finished in a couple of days and concluded in a week, but those tasks that seem to drag on from week-to-week can certainly be difficult. A few updates this week then … ...

Wow! This was a serious week, and where did it go?! A week of reviewing contracts and cost models where the impact is quite significant. Having spent many times over the past few years deep in the belly of excel and breaking down (and justifying) costs for very small assets/activities, well this week was no different. This was one of those where I’m reflecting of methods of pricing - per asset? per environment? cost-plus? Do you want us to management this? Do we need to manage this? If we manage X and Y are we double-charging for Z. Why is this thing cheaper than last year, but this other thing is more expensive? All of these questions are things where I have to bring my technical brain, my financial brain and my sales experience to try and reach the best outcome for both the company and the customer all while often dealing with non-technical procurement folks. Challenging, certainly but I do love this sort of thing because it can go in any direction. It’s also great to test what you thought was a good model with audience who doesn’t know all the detail - lots more takeaways on this. ...

I would summarise this week as writing and reporting. A week of less meeting and more in IC-mode. I find the flexibility to spend some weeks going deep on certain areas to be very useful. I started the week re-reading the corporate blog to get a better feel for the content. Aside from the usual product marketing I think it’s important for engineers to contribute to an organisations public output, as it’s something that helps instill good writing practice and explaining complext technical topics in a straightforward way to a diverse audience. I was reviewing the content from different engineers to get an idea about the types of content we were publishing but also the style, both visual and written. I enjoyed spending the time reading some of the posts I’d missed when they were originally posted and it was an opportunity to work with out marketing team to think more about the guidelines we use to provide consistency the the editing and output. I am also going to be taking away some ideas about how to encourage more engineers in the organisation to write down their ideas and things they have been working on. ...

This week has been a very bumpy week with some exiting conversations but also some very difficult ones. I would say this is also one of those weeks where the incoming tasks and outweighed the completed. I’ve certainly earned by weekend’s rest. Week started with follow-on from last week’s RedShift issue - difficult conversation about cost of change. It was swiftly followed by another escalation by which point I was already done for the week. ...