Weeknotes

Contracts, Damned Contracts and SLAs … 📝 This weeks side quest involved reviewing SLAs. This included identifying gaps, looking at improvements but more critically, doing a lot of scenario planning of where multiple SLAs could compound upon each other. I’ve added a note to write some of this up as a blog post in the next few weeks. 📜 This weeks Project-R update is the long slog of legal back and forth, hunting down potential issues and risks (what we would call bugs - but I’ve come to refer to as Easter eggs), they’ll likely be more of this for a few weeks. As I’m learning more about the legal writing process I’m building up a small GPT prompt to act as my self reviewer and to document the guardrails. I’ll definitely be doing more of this, both on this project but also on a couple more large ones we have in the pipeline, so having something like this to help others will be time well spent. ...

More words, more strategy, more services … 🏛️ Another day in London, this time to spend some time talking about org structure and operating models. Putting my strategy hat on for a little while. In a growing business with growing teams sometimes you have to step away from the operational day to day and spend some time discussing the pinch points of your organisation. Often things grow and move organically in an engineering org and often customer needs will move faster than any structure can reposition itself. This week we took some time to try and think 2 or 3 steps ahead about where we want to be and what an org would look like if we got there. It was a conversation that was sometimes awkward, sometimes surprising but definitely fun and very useful but the sort of thing that you can’t do unless you have a close team that trusts each other. ...

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. ...

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 repository, 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. ...

📜 - 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. ...

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 psychological element that means a clean space puts you in the right head space to start the new year. ...

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 . ...

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. ...