2024 Weeknote 19 : And I thought last week was crazy

May 6-12

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. Subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

[INSERT TORNADO SIREN HERE]

Late on May 7 a potential tornado came to my neighborhood. As it turns out, nothing touched the ground, but it’s the closest call I’ve had in the 10 years I’ve lived here.

It was also the first time since the 1970s that I sheltered in a basement as a precaution, with a wife, 2 cats, and a dog along for the ride.

But man… what a difference 40+ years makes in meteorological data and prediction…

Every geography has some kind of natural disaster threat. The most terrifying in Ohio is the tornado. For more than 12 years living in Alaska, it was earthquakes. And I prefer the earthquakes. Watching this air mass develop 50 miles away and slowly drift in your direction is anxiety-producing in a way that earthquakes can never be.

A changing of the guard

A bit of a change at the office this week had me preoccupied.

I’m now in charge of our organization’s “delivery services” function, on top of our digital services group, the GX Foundry.

There were many reasons for this change, as you might imagine. And it’s not appropriate to share all of those reasons publicly, as it was a nuanced decision that would not make sense without a whole lot of context I can’t provide efficiently.

But the short version is this: our Delivery Services team (formerly the Project Management Office, or PMO) is one of the last teams in our now-nearly-100 person organization to get an opportunity at a cultural and operational transformation. And they deserve that chance to invent a new, positive team culture and future like so many others have gotten before them.

A bit of history… Our organization was, in early 2019, a mess. The 40-some employees still present after years of attacks from an ideological politician and a series of weak leaders were either defensive and suspicious or jaded. Our new (and actually good) CIO arrived in March 2019, and I arrived in August 2019. He initiated a whole-organization reboot, and I did my part by starting a turnaround in the IT infrastructure area. It took a while and a lot of positive new hiring along the way, but we got to a far better place. Even the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t stop our transformation.

I repeated that cultural overhaul in our digital services are in the last couple years (it really took off in 2023). And now we can, finally, do the same thing for the project management folks, who labored under a clandestinely toxic boss that left only a year ago, followed by a series of unrelated leadership changes that kept things up in the air longer than we would have liked.

So I get the honor and privilege of working with the team to bring them into the positive culture we’ve been growing in the rest of the organization for the past 5 years. It ain’t gonna be easy to shake off the old culture. And there are open questions about how we run projects operationally. But we can do it—we can dig in, figure things out, and built a great new culture.

I’ve done it twice already. Third time’s the charm.

24 years of work = 38% complete

Speaking of years of work, I got this notice via LinkedIn this week:

That’s my father. He’s not a social media maven, to be sure. But hey, he’s out there! And apparently he surpassed 24 years at his current employer this week. Sounds amazing, right? Well not really.

What’s actually amazing: He’s 86 years old. And yes, he’s still working full-time. He puts in as many or more hours each week as I do. And 24 years is just 38% of his working life. So far.

Indeed, he had at least 18 years at Owens-Illinois when I was a kid. He had years at the Timken company. And stints at International Paper, Battelle, and loads of other companies. He’s been working continuously as a mechanical engineer in various roles since around 1960—that’s 64 years for those keeping score.

He could retire. But he won’t. He refuses.

So congratulations, Dad, on 24 years. They better throw you a party at 25 years.

Miscellanea

• I spent an off-site day with our leadership team developing our work visualization and prioritization methods. This will also drive 2025 staffing and budget requests.

• Along with two colleagues I presented a breakout session at the annual Quickbase user conference on how we used their platform to solve “Unclaimed Funds” problems for the county Auditor’s office.

• We worked on challenges around procuring Atlassian software products for ourselves and our customers. It’s wild how difficult local government officials choose to make software acquisition, all in the name of “protecting” the public. It’s preposterous on a scale I’ve never experienced, whether in small businesses or multi-billion-dollar corporations.

• After completing “Season 2” of the GX Foundry’s new-for-2024 work calendar a couple weeks back, I’m prepping a brief summary presentation for our “Tech Roundtable” meeting with customers next week. I think most people think we’re crazy for doing this, but it feels like it’s working for the most part. Season 2 was very productive.

• I’m continuing my weekly photo posting blog over on Photonic Teleportation and shared some downtown Columbus shots from a recent sunny afternoon.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

Finally this week, what may very well be the funniest political story of the year: the revelation that RFK, Jr. claims to have had a parasitic worm get into his brain and die. The jokes and memes came on fast and furious and it was glorious. My favorite of the week, perhaps given my Children’s Literature minor…