Weeknotes

This week was the first of two weeks of well earned rest. You’ll see from the past few weeknotes that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with one particularly large new potential customer. I love doing this, it stretches me personally, makes me re-validate assumptions and think from a customer’s point of view. Despite my excitement for this time of work, it can take it’s toll mentally, so I’m glad to have the time off. ...

This week was a whirlwind of code and calls. Where did the week go? I feel like I was on auto-pilot until at least Thursday. Some interesting stuff though. The consistent theme of this week has been death by 30m call. I feel like I’m spoken to most people in our organisation at some point this week on everything from Project-R, to vendors and portfolio to tech practices and managed services. While exhausting, and this happens to time-to-time, on reflection it feels satisfying to have helped a large number of people. ...

This week was Sessions 6,7, and 8 of Project-R and some more portfolio planning and handling a customer business issue. Discussions have started about introducing the Digital Apps portfolio from the wider group into the UK. We’ve been doing everything from developing bespoke applications, modernising applications onto new technology or building integrations and bots. This is all something that I want to bring to our UK customers and I’ve very excited to start working more in this space. Lots and lots more to come on this topic. ...

This week was a little more varied that I was expecting it to be - in a good way. A few new things to keep me motivated with Project-R continues on. Week started with a demo of Control Monkey this a nice tool, from the founder of Spot.io and helps manage large Terraform environments. Managing Terraform at the scale of an MSP, with multiple customers, multiple repositories and multiple Terraform versions is the type of problem where only a dedicated tool will do. I look forward to playing with this more - updates to come. ...

This week has been with 3-days in London, 2 for work and 1 for pleasure. Started the week on Project-R content, more questions, more content to write. 1st day in London presenting to sales on the latest Q2 cloud offerings. It’s amazing just how many opportunities there are and how many customers still haven’t migrated or have migrated and are still running their cloud environment like an old data centre. I love these types of sessions because I get some fresh perspectives and great questions. ...

OK, well this week feels like it’s been about one thing - the massive RFP. This is definitely going to weeks (if not months), from now on for the sake of clarity I’ll be referring to this as Project-R. I can’t say much else about it at this stage, so this weeknote is going to be a short one. My entire week was mostly spent on Project-R. Collaborating with engineers, solutions architects, managed services and starting to write down lots and lots of content. ...

This week was one of those week that really didn’t go to plan. I was intending to spend a bit more time with the portfolio team but instead we got a very large RFP out of no where and a serious incident for one of our most high-profile customers - fun times. Got started on one of the largest RFPs I’ve seen to-date. Very long, very detailed, it look me a few hours to read before even being able to think about responses. I think this one is going take a lot of time over the next few weeks. ...

This week as been a bit all over the place and I’m not really sure where it’s gone. Getting back into work mode slowly and socialising more than expected. Admin and killing off things This week, work has mostly been a lot admin-y type work with the unfortunate complexity of being just outside of the capabilities of our internal GPT instance. Given that some of this is mind-numbingly boring, I’ve been taking my usual tactic of loud music in the background to keep me motivated - I should probably stick all this into a playlist to share for people in the same situation. ...

This week I have my product/portfolio hat on again while also taking some time to think about what’s next. reviewing current product roadmaps (what’s coming and what’s ending) - pretty happy how it’s coming together. re-reading my 2023+ technology strategy document - still stands up but probably needs a re-work in a few places. Should be updated annually. writing some scripts that help enable various cloud features we find useful when on-boarding a new customer. following up on the AWS service deprecation debacle and putting together the plan. writing a new job description - it’s been a while since I’ve done that. Every time I forgot how difficult it is to write a good one. started playing about with Copilot Studio - my brain is starting to fire with some ideas about where we can use this more. Some other interesting things: ...

I have been on leave this week and taking a traditional camping holiday with the wider family. This is a combination of total chaos (as family events usually are) and a time to read and reflect. It’s the time when not only do I catch up on some fiction but also those long form articles that seem a bit too much after a long working week. One thing I also like about the camping trips are the late night conversations around the fire. It’s the time when you hear those stories about things that are most important and most impactful. ...