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.

  • In addition, I spend some time with our product team this week looking at the product roadmap as a whole. The main questions I’m trying to answer here are: are we balancing improvements with new? How much are the team delivering and can we improve flow? Additionally, are the things we delivering across all the product areas well integrated with each other, so that we’re providing outcomes not the Argos catalog (yes, that’s a dated reference)?

  • I spend my last working day of the year on two personal topics - my H2 planning and my CY25 comms plan. Looking at the key things I want to achieve - re-launching our Digital Apps portfolio and expanding on engineering-led sales. Also looking at who I want to achieve those things with - how often I am meeting those up, down and across the business and how often are they F2F? I am certainly planning a little bit more F2F time this year and I’ve noticed that no only do others find it useful for me to be more obviously available but if I find the right balance of office visits then I am motivated by them rather than exhausted by them. This reflection time was a great way for me to conclude the working week and prepare myself for the new year.

This weeks background entertainment:

Also this week was my annual tradition of: