2024 Weeknote 34 : GX+ Season 4 is a wrap

Weeknotes 4 Minutes

August 19 – 25

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

[1] GX+ Season 4 complete

At the start of 2024, we created a new model for how work would be organized across the GX Foundry. We used a “seasons” conceptual model, where we take an 8-week period and break it up into 1 week of prep, 6 weeks of work, and 1 week of wrap-up, all in a TV show or streaming TV service metaphor. We used the metaphor in order to escape the dogmatic thinking that often pervades things like Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and other models. (A big inspiration was the Shape Up concept pioneered by the folks at Basecamp.) By creating something new, modeled on familiar things, we could make it our own and create our own rules and definitions. The TV stuff made it more fun, too.

Well, this week was the end of Season 4. At the end of each Season, we gather and share accomplishments from the past 8 weeks. It’s a mini-celebration, and a chance to tell our peers about the work we’ve been doing, because we’re all so heads-down focused on our stuff we don’t get much of a chance to see what everyone else is doing.

We’re working on a post for the GX Foundry website that should come out this week that will summarize everything and share versions of our slide decks. We’re still evolving this model and how we share the results, but one thing is clear — we want to hold ourselves publicly accountable and share our work with others in the space.

For fun, here are 3 individual slides from each of the decks created by the teams:

Our GX Concourse team (just 2 people so far, working on our new countywide digital service hub) shared their top-line accomplishments from the last 8 weeks. High design is Sarah Gray’s specialty, so it really stands out in our collection.
This is the “overview” slide from the GX Development team, as assembled by Eric Nutt. Eric has become a nut (see what I did there?) for Charlie XCX, so he’s having a brat summer and decided to use the user-hostile design popularized by the artist. The whole deck is like this. So you either find it endearing or your find it annoying. No middle ground!
Finally, just one slide from the GX Platforms team, assembled by Denise Roberts. This one had multiple animated GIFs and shared some of the challenges we’re having with getting Atlassian products into the hands of multiple agencies—all because the county’s lawyers don’t know how to balance business benefit with risk management in the procurement process. The lawyers are holding up digital transformations that would improve the work of hundreds (if not thousands) of county employees simply because they’re not sure if we can “trust” one of the biggest software corporations on Earth. Yeah, okay.

Stay tuned to our GX Foundry site for a GX+ Season 4 recap soon!

[2] Excited to work with USDR on matters of talent

Also had a brief meeting this week with Keith Wilson from the talent division at U.S. Digital Response (USDR) to prep for our engagement around talent development and structure within our GX Foundry digital services team. It also happened to be a big announcement week for USDR…

We’ll be talking with USDR volunteers in the weeks and months ahead to review job descriptions and our team compositions and structures. We want to be growing in the right ways to handle current and future digital needs.

[3] Storytelling for fundraising

Much has already been said about this, but I didn’t want the week to pass by without calling attention to the sharpest example of storytelling I’ve ever seen when it comes to fundraising. Yes, this is the infamous “Doritos” email message from the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. A snippet is below:

This is just a remarkable use of storytelling to evoke feelings and images and human-scaled relatability for the reader. I’m sure this is at least a part of the reason they’ve raised $540M since Biden dropped out of the race. And this kind of message would work with either party — storytelling is a territory anyone can traverse.

[4] Miscellanea

  • I recently appeared in a NACo webinar and shared the info and links on the GX Foundry website — A bit about how we moved from projects to products in our digital work
  • Our friends at Code for America dropped all their 2024 Summit videos, and I shared the links and my favorites — Code for America Summit 2024 videos now available
  • HBR posted a great collection of ways to build team cohesion regardless of team location — 17 Team-Building Activities for In-Person, Remote, and Hybrid Teams
  • We have a brand new Project Manager starting this next week, and I’m excited to see how she will mesh with the changes we are bringing to our processes.
  • We also selected a new Business Analyst to hire next month. He joins us from the Help Desk and has a keen solution-focused and user-supportive mind to add to our abilities.
  • We finished the first pass of 2025 budgeting this past week. It was like pulling teeth this time. But we’ll vastly improve it for next year.
  • One key request in the 2025 budget is the purchase and deployment of a countywide Employee Experience platform. I’m assuming it will be shot down this year, then the outcry from users will become evident over time and we’ll have to do it in 2026. Of course, it’s possible county leaders will see the value and fund it right away. We’ll see!

[5] Watch This

As noted on the GX Foundry site, the Code for America Summit 2024 videos are out. There are several really good ones, but the one below is one of my favorites. It’s wonky stuff aimed at the and folks out there, but it’s a good discussion. I can’t thank the Beeck Center or USDR enough for their public service.

[6] Internet Funnies

This next one is another masterpiece in social media promotional messaging. Whoever did this at the National Park Service needs a raise. (And yes, I have been to Mammoth Cave National Park — it’s a very, very big cave system, so… what were you expecting?)

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