Weeknotes

This week was one of those week that really didn’t go to plan. I was intending to spend a bit more time with the portfolio team but instead we got a very large RFP out of no where and a serious incident for one of our most high-profile customers - fun times. Got started on one of the largest RFPs I’ve seen to-date. Very long, very detailed, it look me a few hours to read before even being able to think about responses. I think this one is going take a lot of time over the next few weeks. ...

This week as been a bit all over the place and I’m not really sure where it’s gone. Getting back into work mode slowly and socialising more than expected. Admin and killing off things This week, work has mostly been a lot admin-y type work with the unfortunate complexity of being just outside of the capabilities of our internal GPT instance. Given that some of this is mind-numbingly boring, I’ve been taking my usual tactic of loud music in the background to keep me motivated - I should probably stick all this into a playlist to share for people in the same situation. ...

This week I have my product/portfolio hat on again while also taking some time to think about what’s next. reviewing current product roadmaps (what’s coming and what’s ending) - pretty happy how it’s coming together. re-reading my 2023+ technology strategy document - still stands up but probably needs a re-work in a few places. Should be updated annually. writing some scripts that help enable various cloud features we find useful when onboarding a new customer. following up on the AWS service deprecation debacle and putting together the plan. writing a new job description - it’s been a while since I’ve done that. Every time I forgot how difficult it is to write a good one. started playing about with Copilot Studio - my brain is starting to fire with some ideas about where we can use this more. Some other interesting things: ...

I have been on leave this week and taking a traditional camping holiday with the wider family. This is a combination of total chaos (as family events usually are) and a time to read and reflect. It’s the time when not only do I catch up on some fiction but also those long form articles that seem a bit too much after a long working week. One thing I also like about the camping trips are the late night conversations around the fire. It’s the time when you hear those stories about things that are most important and most impactful. ...

This week involved another office trip, some good discussions with partners and lots added to this site. Products and Service I spent another than day in the office this, with two back-to-back workshops: one involving product structure and the other on evolution of managed services and customer experience. Ordinarily these would be great sessions in their own right on any given day, but when put together on the same day it brings a whole new perspective. I’m deeply excited about making our services easier to consume and having our teams be more proactive and engaged with customers. The most value I’m had in my new role is the time I’m spent with customers and solving their immediate problems. I can’t wait for every engineer to have that engagement. ...

A small about of time in the office this week at couple of days with 20k steps completed, meaning this week has been a week of energy and motivation. This is week number 16 (4 months) of me writing up weeknotes, it’s been challenging at times but I’m still getting value from it so I will continue to do it. I’ll write up a bit more on this in a blog post next week but see below for some ideas I have to change up the format of this a little in future weeks. ...

A short working week this week with lots and lots of writing (again) What I’ve been doing This week I have been working on the largest bid of my career - 65k words and counting + other attachments (of which I personally wrote at least 30k). Always good to get into the weeds on these things and also a realization that when needing to write about topics I know well to a very tight deadline - I can actually succeed. Maybe all this practice here is paying off. ...

Well this week has felt like a continuation of last week (more like one long week with no obvious separation), and I’m been very much focusing on some changes to increase my productivity, and thinking more about how much I really value writing and I should do it more. What I’ve been doing I’ve been writing down the stuff I do for a while, in scribbled books, 1:1 notes or brag documents. As an alternative, this week I have started doing daily notes in Obsidian. Like many other I use a bit of a template for this, but it’s not too complicated. For obvious reasons, unlike weeknotes I won’t be posting my daily notes anywhere public but it does come in handy when taking the time to reflect on the week for these posts. ...

This week has overall been a pretty good week, the weather has been great. I feel like I’ve got a lot of tasks closed off and I’ve spent time in the office. What I’ve been doing This week has been about scaling and automation. Working with different team from portfolio, delivery and managed services to work through the details of some small adjustments to improve how we can deliver more to customers faster aka scale. I’ve also been going into more depth on our levels of automation, especially in the dark corners when automation is not systems but scripts. Trying to pull it all together into one solution. ...

Writing lots and lots of internal content again this week, supporting people to think bigger and reading some interesting articles. What I’ve been doing This week has mostly been about thinking about what a modern managed service looks like. What does an outsource ITIL managed service need to look like? How pro-active? What do the commitments and outputs need to look like? How does it need to “feel” in 2024. This has all meant lots of conversation, lots of writing and lots of supporting people to think outside of their comfort zone. ...