New people, new questions, new inspiration … 🚸 - Started the week with an introduction session with our new work experience folks. Giving a “this is what we do” presentation but without all the industry-speak was quite refreshing. The questions I got were inspiring and I really got a kick of out talking to these teenagers at the start of their journey. I really must do this more. ...
I’ve been off this week for some R&R and to focus on a bit of house admin. So it will be a light weeknote this week. 🏠- Spent some time focused on tidying the house, boxing things to move into storage and throwing things into a hired skip. Preparing the house ready to put onto the market. We’ve lived here for 8 years now so we’re accumulated a lot. It will take longer than a week but it’s a good start. ...
Half a working week this week, only Mon-Wed but it didn’t feel any less busy. This week was mostly about supporting our tech practice leaders in thinking about their roadmaps for the new year. I’ve been working on roadmaps and strategy for a while now and over the next year the real task is to delegate more of this work and support the tech practice leaders and their corresponding product managers to really take more ownership and accountability for the direction. ...
This week has been a little calmer than previous weeks, it’s given me time to focus on a slider wider range of topics that I have been able to previously. Now that I’m into year 2 of weeknotes, I am also thinking about a couple of additions of the next few weeks. 📓 - I’ve noticed that writing these weeknotes week after week acts a bit like an anonymous accountability buddy where I am encouraged throughout the week to take a little note of the meaningful things I did so that I can write them up at the end. This means I am thinking about a few other things that I might want to include here in the future: what I am listening to, what games I am playing, my health stats from the week. I’m not sure exactly when or where these will fit in but I am certainly thinking about adding more detail over time. ...
Birthday week, time in front of the camera and thinking about UX. 🌀 - Spent some time this week thinking through some requirements for our customer facing portals. It’s part of my wider strategy to really enhance this customer interaction point while also maintaining a human feel for the service. This week has been filtering out ideas of functionality being developed across the business and how that might look and feel when presented to the customer in an integrated way. I don’t put my BA/Product manager/design hats on often but when I do, it is something I enjoy. ...
It’s been a year! I’ve managed to keep up this little weeknote habit for 52 weeks. For something that I thought would probably last a couple of months and then get deleted, I’m pretty happy with myself that I’ve got this far. There have been a few things I’ve learnt from this process, the main thing being is that there is quite a bit of repetition week-to-week because the projects and initiatives I work on typically take a lot longer than initially expected - planning fallacy right there! Anyway, I’m still enjoying writing these even if it’s only me that’s reading and reflecting on them. ...
A quick one this week and not my usual weeknote. I spent this week in on a work trip to Chamonix, a seasonal work event that used to take place every year but hadn’t been done since 2019 and has now been brought back. This is the time of year when I spend the most time with my peers from other countries and I value every second of it. ...
This week had some good news and the I had so many meetings and ad-hoc calls I couldn’t really tell you what day it was. Overall though this week is a quick weeknote as there was only a couple of key things really going on this week. 🚌 - Got verbal confirmation from the CEO that Project-R is going ahead. This meant the week was full of calls preparing everyone for what’s to come, introducing people to the project who haven’t been involving and getting engineering assigned to the engagement. With a project of this size this also meant ensuring everyone was calm, despite the challenges, and hopefully they fed off my confidence. ...
In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment … 🧰 - On Monday, I had a great session with our development team working on our migration and modernisation tooling. As you can image, migrations, replacements and upgrades of software and infrastructure are something we do every day. Sometimes this is a big thing, as part of a big project but sometimes this is simply a single VM or PaaS solution. As we do this across many platforms, we’ve spent the past few years building out our own tooling for this purpose and to encode some of our many hard-won lessons. This week I got to see the latest update on this, with some great integrations with our managed service tooling, some excellent improvements to help our project managers on larger projects and better support for evidence gathering when working on projects with external auditors. As the initial sponsor of this project many years ago, I always get a kick to see it continue to make progress. ...
One crunch, one roadmap, one deep-dive. This week used all my skills and motivation to get me through to the end, but a great sense of achievement. 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 - The week started with some new management training and part of a new program being rolled out. This wouldn’t normally be something of note, as regular management training, be that internal or external is just business-as-usual but in this case it was notable because unlike much of the previous training I have been a part of, this is a new program taking all managers though start HR policies, but is delivered by specialist employment lawyers. What I really liked about this was it took was is typically very stale content and brought it to life in terms of discussions about edge-cases, particular scenarios and what has been learnt from the lawyers experience of employment tribunals and mistakes made by other organisations. While I’m very familiar with our policies, I still learnt a lot from this. ...