June 24 – 30
These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work, but with some personal stuff thrown in.
[1] GX+ Season 3 is a wrap
Our teams finished “Season 3” this week, and it was another solid effort from the GX Foundry. What’s a Season? In simple terms it’s an 8-week period where we spend 1 week in prep, 6 weeks delivering work, and 1 week in wrap-up activities. We use the “Seasons” terminology to avoid colliding with terms like “sprints” or other concepts. And to make it a little fun, like we’re show-running a TV series.
I won’t go into a lot of detail (I’ll save it for the GX Foundry site), but in a quick list the team…
- Completed the annual Water Quality Reports for print and online distribution
- Launched a completely revamped recruiting section of the Sheriff’s website, with a ton of new content based on their DEI goals
- Completed a collaborative security isolation project to move the county’s Bid Opportunities website into a hermetically-sealed container (so to speak); this was a lot of deep technical work and required security, networking, server, and developer teams to coordinate a ton of configuration and testing
- Developed and launched a new community-driven referral application (online) for the Sheriff’s office, designed to intercept youth that may be heading down a bad path, redirecting them toward better options with direct community support. (I’m not linking to it for privacy reasons.)
- Launched a “2.0” edition of the Unclaimed Funds application for the Auditor’s office. This revised edition now has a fully-digital workflow, including document upload, signature submissions via DocuSign, and an email-based back-channel between residents and staff running the program. All that is new! This work boosted an already heavily-improved process and application. A year ago that app was a green-screen COBOL application.
- Continued active support and tweaking of the Box Fans 2.0 app for the Office on Aging. As the summer heat has taken hold in Ohio, it’s been vital to keep this effort up.
- Attended the Code for America Summit for the first time (well, 4 of us did), picking up ideas, contacts, and validating we’re headed in the right direction.
- Presented our Unclaimed Funds 1.0 app at the national Quickbase annual user conference called Empower 2024.
- Completed initial home page wireframes and baseline design elements for the new 2.0 public-facing website for the county, due to be launched next year. This includes a draft information architecture / menu structure.
- Completed an intensive Power BI analysis on election data for our elections board, slicing and dicing voter demographic data in excruciating detail.
- Built a collection of 2025 staffing and project recommendations, since we budget sooooo far in advance.
- Absorbed the Delivery Services team under my management. While that’s not a GX Foundry activity, it definitely ate up a lot of my attention. And it will devour more in Season 4, too.
Our next season starts immediately and there’s always more to do. We’re even looking at working on something that could have come right out of the book we read last year…
[2] Recoding America just got real
It hasn’t happened yet, but we might be starting work on a project that could have been taken out of the pages of Recoding America. A handful of agencies with a long list of disparate social services—justice, senior, child, job, and family support—want to assemble under one banner and… create a unified, digital intake form.
This is discussed in the book and the mistake called out is simply cramming all the different forms together and having Residents fill out a “mega form” that’s confusing, too long, and often duplicative. We’re on alert for that.
I just typed up the core idea over the weekend and we’ll start discussions next week, but hopefully we can do a tiny version of what Civilla did in Michigan.
The only problem? No one has UX Researcher skills or capacity today—not our team, not the agencies involved. To get started, we’ll likely have to “wing it” for a while, then push to add UX capacity so we can ensure we’re building better GX, not just more forms.
[3] DS: RESET
Our Delivery Services (project management) team still needs help in getting things “reset” for a new approach.
We’re looking at creating a unique “Reset Week” in late July. We’ll bring everyone in-house for the week, clear our calendars, and spend nearly all day every day working on clarifying our mission, our motivators, our methods, and reviewing / updating all our project statuses and documentation collections. I even have a trip to the local ballpark on the agenda.
It’s sooooo hard to change the wheels on the bus… when it’s driving down the highway… and if you drop below 50 MPH you blow up. But we’re gonna try!
[4] Miscellanea
- I have so much email to catch up on it’s not funny. I have communications to get out to multiple folks across the country and county and will be spending most of the day today trying to catch up just on email.
- I’m hoping I might be able to go see what Washington, DC’s local government team is doing with Quickbase at their annual in-house “appathon,” if they’ll let me and maybe one or two others observe. They really are leaders with that platform and we could learn a ton.
- We’re in preliminary talks with Granicus about possibly making a presentation to NACo in August. Because I need more work! 😦
- My weekly recordings of Columbus Business First for the local visually-impaired nonprofit continue unabated. But I wonder whether I should drop it to focus more on work.
- Have I mentioned I love Stickermule? I get all kinds of stuff from them: stickers, wall graphics, floor graphics, posters, and we’re even getting acrylic signs for our upcoming “mission wall” installations. We just got custom Culture Code posters for the Delivery Services team this week. My latest “creation” is a pack of 50 magnets I can hand out, especially to our project managers and product owners:
[5] Watch This
I watch a lot of YouTube. I mean… A LOT. All kinds of stuff. Stand-up comedy, classical music concerts, animals, “fail” and “win” videos, and sometimes in the evening, just to put something on that’s quiet and relaxing, I check in with a particular barber shop in Sicily…
These “ASMR” videos are awesome. I can’t believe how well done they are. Key elements:
- No spoken words. Not a one. This makes the appeal universal / international and focuses your attention on the visuals and sounds.
- No smiling or mugging at the camera.
- Good audio of scissors, straight razors, shavers, shampoo and water, and the rest.
- Solid camera work (not the greatest, but plenty good, even for a 4K TV), including a handful of “trick” shots that play into the theme of the episode.
- Several of the videos introduce the barber shop client as a “character” of one kind or another, like the “hipster” in the video above.
- The shop appears to be run by a father / daughter team, and both appear in the videos, sometimes tag-teaming for different parts of a client’s service.
There are about a billion ASMR videos out there, and this is definitely not the cream of that particular crop. But these are a delight for lots of other reasons. Recommended.
[6] Internet Funnies
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