Weeknotes

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. 🛣️ - Monday, also included another review of the product roadmap and some discussions about the FY26 plans. Very excited with how this is being managed now and some of the things that are un-coming. Themes are: simplified and integrated. Less argos catalogue, more car brochure. Lots more security and applications services. It’s not all perfect though, still need to focus more of writing down the strategy, not just the roadmap and also improving our lifecycle management to kill off some older services that are not very profitable. 📜 - Most of the week, was Project-R, the last crunch mode of the contracting phase. I’ll admit this also destroyed me mentally. Tuesday to Thursday, I started at 8 and finished at 6, with a 2-hour meeting in the morning and a 4-hour meeting in the afternoon. Live-editing contracts and reviewing with the customer line-by-line. I remember having this same crunch mode period four years ago with another large customer but it’s easy to forget how difficult that was too. A friend call this my version of the olympics and as amusing as that is, it’s probably pretty accurate as I only do these sorts of size projects on that similar cadence. By the end of the week, when the documents were done, there was a huge sense of relief and a massive sense of achievement. Fingers crossed all this work pays off for the next five-years. 🔐 - Friday, was a trip to London to have a deep-dive on the Cybersecurity roadmap deep-dive. Firstly, having some face-to-face time with a number of colleagues after the crunch time of the week I’ve had was a nice reprieve. I had to opportunity to be presented the current thinking on our cybersecurity strategy, which was great and gave me tonnes to think about. It wasn’t just a long list of new services, but much more thinking had gone on in terms of which vendors we work with, how we integrate services better into our other portfolio, how do refresh pentesting and where we’re investing our development time in building new cybersecurity IP. When I say lots to think about I mean, this has been one of those sessions where I walk away with pages of notes and walk away excited. I mean seriously - what I great way to end the week. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

This week has been about old friends, old projects and live editing. 👥 - Like bookends to my week I got to have a couple of really good conversations this week with some ex-colleagues this week. The first occurring on Tuesday, with someone whom I’m hoping will come back and work with us (but an honest conversation not a sales pitch). The second with one of my favourite ex-colleagues who’s been a bit of a management mentor to me over this years. This was one of our monthly informal catch-ups and after the week of boredom and frustration he certainly helped me enter the week in a positive mood. 🌐 - Starting at the weekend and drip feeding over the next few weeks, I am still making some adjustments to this site. It started at the weekend when I started moving my Mastodon posts to /snippets and following up with beginning to move bookmarks over there as well. Lots still to do like Bluesky posts and old Twitter posts, but it’s really coming along and just keeps me working in this repository (see /changelog for more). I feel at this point that any writing is good writing. 📜 - This week’s Project-R update was brought to you by copy and paste, live editting and GenAI. Spent a lot of hours copy and pasting information between documents, using GenAI to make small amends and act as my peer-reviewer/editor and being on hours of calls live reviewing/editing documents with a customer. Mentally challenging for many reasons. 👨‍💻 - I ended the week spending some time coming back to a bit of an old project - managed services. We’ve been doing a lot recently to improve our managed services and make them feel more modern and increase visibility in what happens inside a managed service. I’ve starting thinking more about this again - how to move the conversation beyond ITIL. Great, you’re an ITIL-based mutli-tier MSP, so what? What’s next? That’s the question I am trying to answer properly. There is likely one or two blog posts coming on this over the next few months. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

Yo Dawg! I heard you like milestones … 🛠️ Spent another day in London, this time for a multi-hour workshop with a large customer in the insurance industry. Not calling it too early but this one might be another one of those that I end up talking about in future weeknotes with my usual Project- prefix. It was a good session, talking about everything from Cloud, workplace functionality, remote working, digital apps and legacy problems. Hopefully gave lots of value but as always cam away with plenty of thing about. It was good to spent a day thinking about a new customer rather than having my head buried in the usual one. 📝 Had a good 2-hour session with the Digital Apps practice, working on service description(s). This was more of a coaching session to support them in turning their ideas into something we can sell. Having not done this much before this was a session to get them thinking about what’s important in a service, how they are constructed, what should be included, what language to use etc. I also took away some great notes that I will use in future GPT prompts to help improve how we do this. I think all gpt prompts should be created this way - developed, shared and battled tested with questions and scenarios from beginners not experts. 💰 One of the areas I have been meaning to get back into is the financial part of our business. Over the years I’ve spent time in this area, working through budgets, commercial models and even helped with the odd bit of invoicing but it’s not my day-to-day and like all knowledge it atrophies over time. So I spent a great hour of 1:1 time with our CFO this week doing a deep-dive on our financials and how the business (both UK and Group) functions. I’ve always through the more I know about this, the more I can advocate for more people to have this understanding but also I can do the things that make our finance team’s jobs a little bit easier. 🧑🏻 On Friday, I had a coaching session. This is a personal session, for which I am help a family friend achieve her coaching apprenticeship, but the value I’ve been getting from these has been great. It’s having someone to bounce some ideas off about how to achieve my personal goals, build habits and to do so sustainably. Lots of notes, plenty small actions and while not making as much progress as I would like I’m certainly making more progress than I think I would be without it. 📜 Project-R - this week’s Project-R update was all about the milestones. Is this milestone too big or too small? Are there too many milestones? Do we do them all in order or not? Are all the deliverables clear for each one? More discussions, more writing, more planning. If you’re having project problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 milestones but a wave ain’t one. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

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’m 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. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

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. 🪪 We had a great internal workshop on Wednesday about identity and access management services. Once upon a time it was all managed AD and VPNs but now we’re handling zero-trust and M365 and there is so much to do in this space that it’s quite exciting. I’ll admit this is not one of my specific areas of expertise so it was great to sit back, listen and watch a team of engineers whiteboard there way to some exciting new positional customer offers. 📜 It wouldn’t be a 2025 weeknote if I didn’t mention Project-R. This week was focused on writing the contract for our migration services. Having written a contract of a similar size and format a few years ago a had a little bit of material to crib from. This week however was also just as much about talking to various teams about various activities and edge-case as it was about getting the raw words on the page. I certainly learnt quite a bit about some services I hadn’t been close too for a while. Again, another 10k words, which is mentally hard to get down on a page, but the lessons that come from it I wouldn’t have it any other way. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

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. ⚙️ I was also involved in a customer presentation on Tuesday which included demos as well as the usual barrage of questions. Having lots of questions I can understand, people want to know what they are buying, but it’s rare for customers to want to see demos of how we do what we do. I was thinking more about it as we were preparing for it and I really couldn’t understand why some customers want to see behind the curtain of a service they are buying and want to see how we deliver services to them and what tools we use. When was the last time you got on a call with your electricity company and asked - can you show me exactly how you get that power from the wind turbine to power my TV and can you show me all the tools? 🎥 - This weeks background entertainment: Usually my evening entertain in TV, however we had run out of things we wanted to watch so this weeks background entertainment was a string of films from the 90s - surprisingly many of which I had never actually seen before ...

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 repo, 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. 🏛️ I was in London for a Townhall session on Wednesday. Unlike in previous stages on my career I don’t go to these things to find out what’s going on, nor on this occasion was I presenting anything. This time I go to them to be in-person with everyone else. I find that on Townhall days that people have lots of questions or they ask questions in the session and it gives them momentum and ideas to ask more later. Any time I’m in person in an office I seem to be a magnet for people asking questions or asking for help and it’s my absolute pleasure. Also, Townhalls are very different in a private company than they are in a public company, you get to be more honest about what’s working well and what’s not, plus the questions are much more direct. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

📜 - 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. ⭕ - This week also including some time discussing Oracle again. I’ll admit my knowledge of the Oracle suit is pretty basic but I’ve explored OCI before and every couple of years the topic of doing more with Oracle (mostly for the Oracle database and OCI) comes up. This time it wasn’t either of those things but Primavera that drove the topic. So, I spend some time talking to our Oracle contacts and some internal folks with the “what if we did this?” question. Certainly not top of my list right now but one of those areas that I keep checking in on and I expect to become more and more important as our over average customer size gets larger. 👩‍🏫 - Last week I mentioned that I had spent some time thinking and writing down goals for the year (they will be published here very soon), well this week quite serendipitously, I had a external coaching session. A family friend of ours is undergoing a coaching apprenticeship and was looking for a few people to do some free sessions that she can use as part of her portfolio. Well, having done external coaching before and having got a lot of value from it, I thought this was great. It was a double-win for me. I got to help out a friend and also have a hour of time to go through my 2024 goals with someone else and get some ideas of how to improve them or make it more likely for them to be successful. I have two more sessions over the next 2 months, so I’ll be posted more about it in future weeknotes. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

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. 🎯 - I’m not one for setting new years resolutions but I certainly like to review goals and objectives and the start of the year seems the perfect time to do so. Nothing new or exciting this year - more building on the habits and patterns of last year which seems to have been going well so far. Having a split week between work and time off means that I’ve also had the opportunity to review both personal and professional goals at the time time and side-by-side. Following on from my process of putting things on this site and therefore out in public, I will be doing so soon with some of this material. 🏢 - Thursday and Friday were the first days back to work and with most other staff still on leave it was a nice slow start to the year and opportunity for a bit of planning and organising. My plan started with reviewing my scheduled meetings making sure I was spending the right about of time with the right people and more importantly how much face-time I was getting. I also did a bit of product planning, reviewing the roadmap and writing a new service description draft and a couple of RFPs. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...