Weeknotes

This week involved another office trip, some good discussions with partners and lots added to this site. Products and Service I spent another than day in the office this, with two back-to-back workshops: one involving product structure and the other on evolution of managed services and customer experience. Ordinarily these would be great sessions in their own right on any given day, but when put together on the same day it brings a whole new perspective. I’m deeply excited about making our services easier to consume and having our teams be more proactive and engaged with customers. The most value I’m had in my new role is the time I’m spent with customers and solving their immediate problems. I can’t wait for every engineer to have that engagement. ...

A small about of time in the office this week at couple of days with 20k steps completed, meaning this week has been a week of energy and motivation. This is week number 16 (4 months) of me writing up weeknotes, it’s been challenging at times but I’m still getting value from it so I will continue to do it. I’ll write up a bit more on this in a blog post next week but see below for some ideas I have to change up the format of this a little in future weeks. ...

A short working week this week with lots and lots of writing (again) What I’ve been doing This week I have been working on the largest bid of my career - 65k words and counting + other attachments (of which I personally wrote at least 30k). Always good to get into the weeds on these things and also a realization that when needing to write about topics I know well to a very tight deadline - I can actually succeed. Maybe all this practice here is paying off. ...

Well this week has felt like a continuation of last week (more like one long week with no obvious separation), and I’m been very much focusing on some changes to increase my productivity, and thinking more about how much I really value writing and I should do it more. What I’ve been doing I’ve been writing down the stuff I do for a while, in scribbled books, 1:1 notes or brag documents. As an alternative, this week I have started doing daily notes in Obsidian. Like many other I use a bit of a template for this, but it’s not too complicated. For obvious reasons, unlike weeknotes I won’t be posting my daily notes anywhere public but it does come in handy when taking the time to reflect on the week for these posts. ...

This week has overall been a pretty good week, the weather has been great. I feel like I’ve got a lot of tasks closed off and I’ve spent time in the office. What I’ve been doing This week has been about scaling and automation. Working with different team from portfolio, delivery and managed services to work through the details of some small adjustments to improve how we can deliver more to customers faster aka scale. I’ve also been going into more depth on our levels of automation, especially in the dark corners when automation is not systems but scripts. Trying to pull it all together into one solution. ...

Writing lots and lots of internal content again this week, supporting people to think bigger and reading some interesting articles. What I’ve been doing This week has mostly been about thinking about what a modern managed service looks like. What does an outsource ITIL managed service need to look like? How pro-active? What do the commitments and outputs need to look like? How does it need to “feel” in 2024. This has all meant lots of conversation, lots of writing and lots of supporting people to think outside of their comfort zone. ...

This week I’ve been doing my best impression of a technical writer and other things have sort of fallen the way side. On a slight side note, this is the first week note I’m using working copy on my phone, it’s taken longer but it’s allowed me to write in smaller fragments during the week, so I think it might result in better content if I can keep it up. ...

This week was about talking to customers and planning roadmaps - exciting, sometimes frustrating but always motivating. What I’ve been doing Working through our product roadmaps for the next year - making sure all different product areas fit together nicely. Also balancing that with talking to some of our customers who have had or are having problems with us to make sure we can effectively deliver what we currently sell before taking on newer shinier things. Also bids (gotta love enterprise sales) which means a few weeks of content discovery, content writing and asking questions like “can we?” and “should we?”. ...

Writing, so much writing. I did an rough estimate before writing this and I think I easily written more than 10k words this week - the size of the average thesis. I love writing (obviously) but technical writing is certainly something of a craft that I always underestimate until having to do it. What I’ve been doing Discussing with a customer about how to move off an ancient k8s cluster deployed on AWS EC2 with KOps - everyone knows I love a bit of technical archaeology. On the other end of the spectrum I have been working on writing about all the details of application support for random (industry specific) applications and how to manage them in a modern way. Fun week all round really :) ...

I’ve caught the first of what is usually several seasonal bugs this week. Been working, but mostly from the sofa. Interesting stuff happened this week, but it was interspersed with coughing. What I’ve been doing I’m been exploring new services. Can’t talk much about them publicly here, but putting my PM hat on for a little while and working with engineers on what some new services look like it always something I enjoy doing. ...