Weeknotes

📜 - 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 phycological 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. 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. ...

A long week spent in technical deep dive conversations with our engineers on topics ranging from support problems, to tools to new ideas - great stuff. The week started focusing on a customer issue. AWS Redshift, single table, 63B rows of unsorted data. Not exactly the sort of thing you come across every day for sure. Lots of discussions about the various options of handle to handle this and help the customer get back to something that was sorted and performant when running large queries. Lots of ideas discussed. Short answer: spend more money for more computer and wait. ...

2 days in the office this week (both Leeds and London) and a week of contrast between the highs of leadership sessions and new portfolio to the lowest of fighting Kusto with my Azure side project. The week started at 5:44, as I boarded my first train on the way to our Leeds office. Expecting to go there to meet a few collogues for an operational meeting (reviewing the progress of our sales strategy) but was very pleasantly surprised by having our entire product team there, our new cohort of graduates and a new starter I hadn’t had chance to meet yet. It was very unexpected but I got to have lots of great conversations about everything from odd Claranet history, to new product ideas and creative ways to a few organizational challenges. Despite not getting home until 21:30, I was left feeling really positive about the day. ...