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 …

  • Our FCA regulated customer had an external audit with us, so I got to team up again with our compliance team. Thankfully, our compliance team are awesome, have done this sort of thing many many times before and have a lot of content and answers pre-prepared. I was really there to provide customer-specific context. These types of session are often multi-hour long sessions, go through line-by-line a long spreadsheet of questions. I do these sorts of things 3-4 times a year, and while it might be easy to think otherwise, I don’t recent doing them for a second. For the difficult ones, I enjoy the challenge of finding the right evidence in the correct format (sometimes writing it) and for the easy ones I enjoy the confidence it brings on thinking that other people can see how good we are at our jobs. This week’s one was certainly the later and probably the quickest and easiest one I’ve done to-date, which proves we are making progress. However, as always there are one or two things where I think the content could have been easier to put together or more joined up.

  • Having spent some time on cost-models last week, this week was another deep dive into the Excel lake, but this time for Project-R. Assisting a few others who had put this model together, going through all the assumptions, all the scenarios, all the costs. All for the typical very-tight deadline. Having been the lead on a project like this myself in 2020/21, I vividly remember the stress that comes with it, the mistakes made, the version after version. My role this week as to assume nothing, question everything and provide some emotional support through the process.

  • Continuing on from last weeks escapades in cloud reporting, this week was more Azure focused than AWS. Looking at end-of-life reporting. To my surprise, we don’t have many things running out of date versions for our Azure customers (really surprising - ask me another time about when we got windows 20003 running on Azure) but it was a good exercise none-the-less.

This weeks background entertainment: