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.

  • We have a few customers who are regulated by the FCA/PRA. One thing that we have to do is always make sure that the services we are provided for them meet those regulatory requirements. I had another opportunity to do that with a customer this week. As is often the case the customer takes responsibility for some elements themselves (or via other third-parties) so the main focus was to review the customers contract with them, re-evaluate if it had everything in it they needed and ensure that they were receiving everything as described. Thankfully there were no fires to put out (this week), however these conversations certainly bring the compliance topic back to the top of my list. When delivering services, it’s really important to only to say “we’re compliant - he’s the badge” but also provide all the content required to demonstrate it in an easily consumable fashion. To-date we’re been good at providing the assets to meet compliance (mostly reporting evidence) but we’re not providing the “X compliance control maps to Y element of our service” which means we’re often having to do this every time. Again another great example of customer conversation that leads to service improvement.

  • A slightly odd one for me this week, slightly out of my skillset - Informix. We have a small niche in providing IBM Informix database support and even more niche, we have examples of running it on AWS. Somewhat out of the blue I ended up discussing Informix with two separate customers this week - one on AWS and one not. It’s great to have these little pockets of technical capability and also let me step back and learn from engineers who know this much better than me.

  • A bit more writing again this week, in helping one of our Technical Service Managers update their service description. Great for me to come at this with some fresh eyes, provide feedback and help the service manager navigate through our product development process for the first time.

Getting me through the week: