I came up on the provider's side — building and running IT services for other people's businesses. Then I spent the Shell decade in the customer's seat, deciding what ready to run actually means.
Provider first, then customer. That's the whole story, and it's why I read these systems the way I do — end to end, from the pitch to the moment a thing stops being a project and becomes part of how the business runs. Out of that vantage came Opsasto: a structured, risk-based, scalable way to assure a service and its operation at the point of go-live, across eight assurance areas.
Across all of it I kept arriving at the same principle: intelligent action — by a person, a team, or an AI agent — needs four things. Clear direction. Memory of the reasoning that came before. Awareness of the context it's operating in. And people who are genuinely engaged and able to act. Remove any one of them and the system degrades; remove the people from the centre and you have something that technically functions but delivers no real value.
The transition framework I built for Shell was one answer to that. The Agentic Engineering Framework I build now is another — a context fabric to hold reasoning and direction, a component fabric to map what depends on what, and four-tier governance for self-healing, self-learning, deterministic execution. Same principle, new domain. And underneath all of it, the oldest rule I have: happy people create good work.
Now: a practice of one, with the company of dragons — transition-management work, the Opsasto writing, and a workshop full of things I actually build and run.