2024 Weeknote 28 : Taking it all in

July 8 – 14

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.

[1] Developing an intake model

I don’t like the word “intake.”

It sounds backwards. Or mechanical. Or something.

But it’s the term of art for how work is taken in the front door before it’s completed and then sent out the back door. And we’ve never done it well, at least not in the 5 years I’ve been here, and I’m told it wasn’t better before that, either.

The problem with a bad intake process is that it sets up everyone for failure. The partner management team (similar to sales reps) don’t know how to capture requests accurately because the process is unclear at best. The project manager can’t get a grip on the work. The technical teams aren’t clear on what they’re doing. The customer may or may not get what they intended or requested. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.

So getting “intake” right is pretty important. It makes or breaks our “delivery” efforts.

So we’ve started a major effort to overhaul this process and document it and share it across the organization, taking input from all the affected teams to ensure we’ve got it right.

So far, we’re at a very high level, but we’ve already figured out the top-line phases:

Operations (current state)
Consulting
Analysis
Delivery
Operations (future state)

Super-simple for now, but it’ll get a lot more detail in the weeks ahead

I know: that seems basic and obvious. But that’s what we need! Something that, upon reflection, is drop-dead obvious for everyone. The challenge is in defining each of those stages and assigning clear and unique responsibility to each of the teams (and sub-teams) involved.

For example, the “Consulting” stage is very murky for us. There are a lot of people that might participate in that work today. Too many, in fact — from the chief executive down to every last help desk analyst. That needs clarification and some restrictions. And the output of the Consulting stage is completely undefined.

I’ve discovered a key challenge for the Delivery Services (project management) group is that their role has been treated like an “amoeba” in the organization. They have to fulfill all kinds of different roles, accept whatever work is thrown their way, and get everyone else to commit to doing their part. Add a bad management layer (for several years) and a demoralized team and you get chaos and frustration for everyone.

So the key to moving ahead will be role clarification and establishing clear, firm interfaces between the stages and teams. We also need to add Business Analysis capacity.

We’ll be doing a ton more work on this in the weeks ahead. But this was the week when it started to come together for me.

[2] Hack Your Bureaucracy book club is in flight

Screenshot from our Confuence space, gathering reading assignments and discussion questions

Following up on the Recoding America book club last fall, we launched a Hack Your Bureaucracy book club this week. This time, we have more than 20 people in the sessions, spanning several teams across the organization.

These book clubs are a TON of work to assemble, but they bring us together to think about our work, our partners, and the broader ecosystem in which we operate. We have so much to learn from our friends at the federal level that started working on human-centered design and digital services a decade ago.

My hope is to connect with one of the authors — Marina Nitze — and have her join one of our sessions remotely. She offered on LinkedIn, and I just need to reach out and see if she can make the time to join us. 🙂

We’ll be reading every 2 or 3 weeks until late November.

[3] Miscellanea

Our GX Foundry team was called out by name in an award announced this week at the annual NACo conference. The Center for Digital Government assessed counties for their “digital” work, and in the 1,000,000+ county category, Franklin County was included in the Top 10. A post about this will be on the GX Foundry site soon.
We completed Round 1 interviews for a Project Manager opening. Round 2 starts immediately. We hope to make an offer to the top candidate by the end of the month. We put a ton of effort into interviews (without making it too onerous for candidates) because we know hiring is the most important thing we do.
We met with WordPress VIP folks this week, which was interesting. I’ve been on WordPress off and on for nearly 20 years, but never on the high-end version of it, with tons of supporting services. Could we use it? Possibly, for a few edge cases. But our main digital services core will definitely stay with Granicus.

[4] Watch This

Sad this video was even needed. But we all know what happened this weekend. Worth noting and remembering. And I hope this is the last time we need an address like this, although America’s tapestry is often bound together with violence. I wish we could grow out of this.