A Year in Review, 2025.

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This year has possibly been the most complex soft skill learning year I have ever had.

A lot of what I deliver for clients is highly technical, which is both a joy to learn and relatively easy, and because I have spent my entire life playing keep-up with technology, it’s familiar ground.

This year, though, has brought a great many eye-opening lessons in areas that were far outside the usual. Everything from lots more finance work to extensive vendor negotiation has landed on my plate.

Normally I am brought in to fix problems caused by existing failings rather than set things up, but this year included complex, near-legal discussions on statements of work and costings. There was also a huge amount of cross-departmental paperwork aimed at understanding how large scale projects function inside giant multinationals, something of a black hole and easily as complicated as any technical delivery.

In addition to these finance areas, there have been a great many true soft skill lessons. I have had the privilege of working closely with people managing real accessibility challenges and have seen firsthand how they often work three or four times as hard as the rest of us simply to get through the working day. While we should agree that everyone should have equal opportunity regardless of disability, actually working alongside people facing these barriers has been eye-opening. They consistently put in more effort and represent extraordinary value to any corporation. It’s been a humbling experience all round but very rewarding.

The technical side has continued to grow at pace. I have had to pick up a lot of serious AI knowledge, so much so that in the coming year I am taking external courses to formalise it. There is such an overwhelming amount of fluff being pushed on AI’s supposed value that you reach the point where you must actually code solutions to really see how things work. It is good to get back to that and cut through the marketing bullshit. There has also been a strong swing towards Azure in my day-to-day work rather than AWS, purely due to the current client environment. The reality is that the three major cloud providers all move so quickly that you have to run to simply keep up.

Looping back from cloud to finance, there has been a lot of joined up learning. Everyone uses cloud services now, but many still fail to notice that day-to-day cloud costs are often higher than on-premise solutions. Nor does being in the cloud guarantee decent technical redundancy. Even highly skilled teams overlook painfully obvious risks. My favourite example this year was discovering a client relying on Azure private endpoints for multi-region disaster recovery, without realising that a full regional outage removes private endpoints entirely, meaning their multi-region DR would not work. At scale, cloud architecture is still not a mature discipline.

Next year has already made it clear that it will require a different set of expertise to 2025. Many major corporations are moving back towards pre-Covid behaviours, and while that shift was not obvious during the early days of the new world of supposed permanent remote working, it is now becoming very real.

Neither my partner nor I ever truly believed that everything would remain fully remote or that corporate life would permanently become looser and more relaxed. Because of that, we leaned further into central London. With the majority of clients now wanting people back on site, this has turned out to be a genuine advantage. It means I can be present whenever clients need me, suited and booted, and delivering what they require where they require it.

From a delivery perspective, it looks like security will once again occupy a significant part of my working life this year. This ties directly back to the last major wave of cloud adoption. Most organisations have now gone through their last big push to cloud services. Many no longer have any data centres at all, with leases expiring and on-premise estates being fully retired. A huge number of features and platforms have been moved over in a relatively short space of time.

Now, however, the costs are arriving. With that comes a level of wrangling that would not normally have taken place when teams were more rigidly siloed. Finance, security, architecture and delivery are all battling around the same conversations, often for the first time.

Working through this will require a mishmash of technical expertise and soft skills. There are many very clever people involved, all with strong opinions. Navigating those views, whether from finance, security, or pure functional practicality, is going to be a real roll-your-sleeves-up kind of challenge.

All in all, 2025 was real brain work and 2026 looks even harder

Planning the Next Three Months.

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That time has rolled around again when a major client decides to shift direction. In this case, the client has moved to an “internal first” approach in which all projects are by preference run by internal staff rather than consultants or vendors. Part of a rather neat way of upskilling their permanent people.

I have been through this two or three times before. It is an expected part of the corporate life cycle. The challenge is not the decision itself, but how you handle it. Given the nature of what I do and the skillset I have, I am usually involved in several projects at once, each with its own timeline and statement of work. Even though I have been working on multiple projects over the last couple of years for the same global group, they will not all finish neatly at the same time. About half will wrap up at the end of the financial year. but one will carry on for a couple of months beyond that.

This leaves me with only a 50 percent commitment for the first 2 months of 2026. Normally this is not a problem. You simply take on additional clients, join my fellow LDC Via members on other projects, and carry on as any consultancy would. This time is a little different because I have been on call for this particular client for more than a year. Moving back to a restrictive and rigid time allocation could spoil an excellent existing relationship.

So how should I handle it?

In this case, skill development has come to the rescue. Like everyone else, I have been upskilling in AI and related technologies, but the deeper I dug into the true nuts and bolts of its implementation rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon, the more I realised how serious a discipline it really is. AI integration is far more than bolting a chatbot on top of your database. There is an enormous amount of nuance and variance in structure and architecture if you want it to be genuinely useful to a client.

Add a few months of relatively fluid time, and the situation more or less screams “deep dive learning”. Fortunately, there are proper boot camps where you effectively become a developer for a couple of months, work in sprints, and demo at the end of each one. It is an intense way of learning, and the one I have enrolled in and paid for should fill the gaps in the AI knowledge I have identified from my work so far.

It also means I will remain on call for the major client through January and February, giving them the level of delivery they want at the price that suits us both. I get the learning in, and the next client benefits from everything I have picked up.

What surprises me is how new this mindset seems to be for some colleagues. This is not contractor thinking. This is consultancy thinking. You plan ahead by at least three months, build your capabilities, and make sure that for the next engagement you’re stronger than the last.

And on that note, if you are looking for a technical PM or an integration architect at the end of February, do feel free to knock on my door. Or speak to LDC Via and we will see how we can help.

Baseline Thinking: The real difference between corporations, massive organisations and the rest of us.

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This is an insight that struck me recently, though it’s hardly new. In fact, anyone working in marketing or public relations will tell you the same: people, as individuals, are intelligent. People in groups, however, can behave in very odd ways.

So how does this play out in the corporate world? It often comes down to the gap between how small groups of experts expect people to react and how large organisations know people actually react.

Take something as simple as installing software. If you give a set of instructions to technical experts or developers, they’ll follow them making intuitive choices along the way. Rarely will anything need spelling out. The target audience will just handle it.

Now compare that with giving the same instructions to the general public. Suddenly you need to specify every click, every option, every screen. What feels like minutiae to an expert is essential detail to ensure success for the rest of humanity.

Now you have this understanding, you can explain it to your experts as they will often wonder why corporate infrastructure demands such exhaustive, step-by-step detail. To the expert, it feels pedantic, even pernickety and pointless. But for a corporate support team, responsible for thousands of people with widely varying levels of knowledge it is just dealing with a very broad baseline of humanity.

Because in that large, mixed pool of users, someone will get it wrong. Someone will click the wrong thing, misread the obvious, or inadvertently cause chaos. And if support hasn’t built in the safeguards, they’re the ones left cleaning up the mess.

So next time you find yourself rolling your eyes at “silly” questions from corporate support, remember: they’re not being awkward. They’re working to a broader baseline of understanding, one designed to prevent the inevitable finger-pointing blame game from happening

What I carry in my Work Pack 2025

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This is an update to my 2023 post of the same name, and a companion to my fellow LDC Via colleague’s post. Back in the Lotus days we used to do these regularly about our desks, but now we’re all far more mobile. I spend a lot of time travelling and working in clients’ offices. My habit of carrying just about everything has continued, in fact, it’s probably got a bit worse. I like to arrive on site and not need a single thing from the client, not even power.

The bag

I’ve stepped up from my previous lightweight rucksack to one mainly designed for camera gear, and it’s perfect. It opens completely flat, almost like a suitcase, so it’s easy to pack, with multiple pockets and near bomb-proof construction. The only downside is the laptop sleeve sits in the lid; I’d prefer it against my back. Aside from that, it’s spot on. As you can see, I pack it to the gunwales.

Power & cables

Most of the power kit remains the tried-and-true set, updated to newer versions. I’m using the latest Anker power brick and the same power supply and cables I normally carry. I now keep two or three USB-C leads, plus a Thunderbolt cable, while I don’t use Apple products, everyone I know seems to, and a friend with a cable is a friend indeed.

I’ve switched my earpiece to Yealink. It’s cheaper, and, oddly, the microphone is better than my previous Sennheiser ones. I also carry a backup mouse. My main mouse is still a Logitech, kept in a hard case.

Notebooks & pens

My notepad used to be a Moleskine, but they stopped making the hard notebooks I liked, so I ordered custom ones. They turned out cheaper than Moleskine and exactly what I wanted. I’ve moved from a ballpoint to a fibre-tip pen, more convenient, and I’m working through various brands to find one that doesn’t disintegrate after a short time.

Food & drink

I’m carrying more of my own food now. Turning up to client sites on industrial estates means there’s rarely food or drink nearby, and bringing my own helps diet-wise. I tend to carry a couple of energy drinks, some vitamins, a couple of protein bars, ginger shots in a flask, and a water bottle.

On water bottles: I want one that won’t topple easily, seals absolutely watertight (you’d be amazed how many don’t), and is easy to scrub out. I’ve ended up using a classic Thermos food flask and it’s been perfect.

Clothing & comforts

I now carry a reinforced glasses case with backup specs (I am, after all, an older man), and a shoe bag. I don’t walk around in smart shoes, too much distance, so I carry work shoes separately.

I’ve upgraded the desk fan to a unit originally designed to cool a PS5. It’s utterly silent and runs off USB,

Stationery & spares

My portable keyboard is still the same Logitech one from 2023 in a hard case. In the same pouch I keep sticky bookmarks, blank to-do cards, and spare pens.

Misc. items

Heavy-duty “shower” wipes, not just baby wipes, plus a small spot cleaner and ordinary tissues.

Spare collar stiffeners, whiteboard markers (details are in the 2023 post) and a microfibre cloth.

It does weigh quite a bit, especially with all the liquids, but it means I arrive prepared, feel professional, and can be self-sufficient at any client site.

 

Time for Some Paperwork

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One of the core differences I’ve found between the highly technical work I did for most of my career and the more managerial, higher-level work I’ve focused on in the last decade is the need for certifications.

When you’re purely technical, certifications are often slightly looked down on. Think back to the old MCSE days: we’d do boot camps, pass them in droves, and they became less and less relevant. On top of that, so much technical work is done in ways the vendor never intended. Salesforce and IBM are both particularly famous for this.

In integration work I often found ways to do what they didn’t want you to do or to get round things without paying extra. Certifications mattered very little. You went to technical interviews, had proper conversations, and your reputation for solving problems, plus the evidence on places like this blog, proved you were worth the money.

In the managerial space, it’s harder. Almost everyone can talk the hind legs off a donkey. People are very good at making a case because they’ve sold projects and big ideas for years, and they’re used to selling themselves. So when I reviewed my CV (as I do every six months) and asked, “What can I update to show I’m better at my job for a client?”, there wasn’t a great deal I could change. I had more projects under my belt and more experience, of course, but it didn’t give me much I could actually update. Unlike technical roles, much of management has been, frankly, the same for decades, if not centuries.

So what to do? Well, I’ve sounded out clients informally and looked at what potential roles are wanting, and I’ve landed on a list of qualifications, courses, and bits of paperwork I should complete to demonstrate the progression I want to show as an individual and a consultant. Quite a lot of them are stuff I have been actually practicing for many years, so passing should hopefully be a case of phrasing my existing knowledge in the format the examiners want, but some will be genuine learning, and that is always fun.

This post is mainly a line in the sand for me, something I can update over time, but it should also give others an indication of what you might need if you’re heading down a similar path. They are as follows:

Then the Big boys that will take some time to complete

  1. This one is more an in-passing item [↩]