2024 Weeknote 17

Weeknotes, Weeknotes and Essays 3 Minutes

April 22-28

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.

Most of the past week was spent digging into some of the bigger themes that will dominate my attention over the next few months: building staffing plans and changing up how our teams manage their work visibly and collaboratively.

Meanwhile, we hosted a nicely-done Take Your Child to Work Day event this past week. I don’t have kids, but this was fun to see around the office.

Big aspirations require “big” staffing boost

In prepping for 2025 budget season (yes, it’s ridiculously early) I’ve been building and refining a list of project staffing needs. Many of the items on the list are aspirational, and some of them stretch out into 2026 and even 2027. But when all the staff asks and ideas are combined, it’s a bit shocking to see.

Today my team is about 16 people. But my proposals for consideration would, over the next few years, add up to 40 people to the team. That’s 150% growth over 2+ years. It sounds shocking, even to me, except…

  • Today we’re only staffed to barely sustain what we have, and can’t really tackle any big new issues or goals. The technical debt load is… well, it’s a lot.

  • We haven’t really started any digital transformation efforts in earnest (we have a few small examples), despite formation of the GX Foundry. If the county wants transformation, it’s going to take a lot more people to execute that work.

  • Our overall organization—FCDC—grew more than 130% in the last 4 years, and most of that growth was to cover for technical debt and sustainability of systems, so big growth is not unprecedented. Plus, all the growth was in our security and infrastructure areas, not digital services.

  • Our total FCDC team—about 97 today—builds and maintains systems that support roughly 6,000 users (to one degree or another)—so we are just 1.6% of the total employee base—a criminally-low number for teams that build IT infrastructure, maintain cybersecurity, and support key software platforms.

  • Finally, I don’t expect the powers-that-be will support growth at this rate anyway. I’ll take 100% growth over 2 years if I can get it.

One of the hallmarks of my list, by the way, is to make recommendations to the county, not wait for requests. If we wait for the county’s various agencies to ask for digital transformation, we’ll be waiting a very, very long time. We have to propose it, evangelize it, gather the support and get the resources. Then we have to prove out the value (which is fairly easy to do).

But there is one glimmer of hope today. An active project with the Sheriff’s office is building demand by proving out the value of killing paper forms and paper processing. A tiny team inside the Sheriff is getting results from working with us, and it’s getting a little bit of attention. That’s where we need to lean in to the small projects to make big points about the value we can deliver.

Transforming our own work management

Another leadership conversation boomeranged into view this past week: How should we, across all our teams, organize and visualize our work? We have a laundry list of digital tools in place today, collected over the last few years—some of which I was instrumental in introducing. But the cacophony of tools and the different needs of the teams has fractured where work is tracked and discussed, making centralized visualization, coordination, and management difficult or—really— impossible.

So in recent months the proposal has surfaced that we reduce the tools and standardize. This has caused some consternation. But it’s the right thing to do. Here’s a brief before/after view:

Before: 7 tools

After (if approved): 3 tools

  • Jira Software for work visualization / project management

    • Eliminate Smartsheet

    • Eliminate Jira Work Management

    • Eliminate Trello

    • Eliminate AgilePlace

  • Jira Service Management for request and incident management

  • Harvest for time tracking / billing (for now)

    • Eliminate Forecast (because we never really got it going anyway)

Making these kinds of changes has an impact on teams and leaders and requires retooling in some cases. But if we proceed, it will also enable new tools and behaviors. The question is: Can we get it done?

If we can, our GX Platforms team will lead the way, helping teams to make the transition.

Internet funnies

Finally, a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

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