2025 Weeknote 13 : The only constant is change

March 24 – 30

Weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work. These are mine. Learn more about weeknotes here.

I’m late getting the weeknotes out this week, as it was a very busy week and I’m spending a lot of “free” time thinking about some strategic leadership matters. Plus I had a visit from the folks on Sunday. So a bit late. My apologies.

Professional weeknotes

New weekly work review cycle

This week we started a brand-new weekly review of all project work across the organization. A full 90 minutes per week, which isn’t nearly enough time to cover everything, but should be enough time to cover highlights and address items that are off track in some fashion. We are almost done loading up “notable” work efforts into our Atlassian platform (in what used to be called “Atlas”).

Upgraded onboarding model

When I started at FCDC nearly 6 years ago, we didn’t really have an onboarding process worth mentioning. All I had was a scheduled series of meetings with my boss to talk about what was going on in the organization, and it was pretty random. But over the years we’ve raised the bar in both the hiring process and the onboarding process. This month I spent a ton of time developing the most comprehensive onboarding process I could muster for one of our new hires. It’s a sea of checkboxes, and it’s… a little intimidating at first glance. However, the document is designed to address things to get done and to learn over the first 6 months of employment, so there’s plenty of time to check off the boxes along the way. Hopefully we’ll keep improving and learning as we do more hiring in the months and years to come.

Old logos, new logos… unified branding?

This past week (and this coming week) we’re having some exploratory conversations about options to apply some revised branding to our organization in the form of a new logo. A few years back we developed a name, mark, and type treatment for the GX Foundry team and have been very pleased with it. But the logo for our host organization, FCDC, is much older and… nobody really loves it. So this week we prepped a presentation to be delivered next week to explore the potential to create a new logo for the main organization, but do it rapidly and at very low cost. Most logo / branding developments are expensive, convoluted affairs that take a long time. We’re going to see if we can short-circuit the process and develop a branding system for all our teams and the full organization by re-using elements we’ve already generated. We’ll see how it goes. I’m thinking it’s a 50/50 chance we move ahead.

Thinking about strategy re-development

Through a variety of conversations this past week, I’ve learned the time is growing near for a re-examination of our strategies around software tools, platforms, and methods. I’m hearing staff are unsure of, or concerned about, our model and their roles in it but are unwilling to bring it up directly (so far). To break the logjam and get talks going, I’m thinking about how to start those conversations from the top down, but engaging everyone—developers in particular—in the talks. I know this is vague, but I know some folks read my weeknotes, so I can’t get too specific. Plus, it’s early days for my thinking—I’m not ready to put anything out there yet. Bottom line: I suspected there were some challenges with tools, workload, and even some culture issues, and I’ve had those suspicions confirmed. I have more to learn first, then we can get the talks rolling. We owe it to our team to have a clear strategy and firm leadership so they can make decisions about the work they do and where they do it.

A good slipped deadline

If you know Star Trek (the original), you know Scotty the engineer was a “miracle worker” who could beat any deadline with ingenious solutions. True fans also know Scotty routinely inflated his project estimates to ensure he retained that miracle worker reputation—he under-promised and over-delivered by design. Well, at the end of this week a massive project we’re running in one of our agencies slipped its deadline from the end of March to the end of July. Finally. This project should never have had the March deadline, and our client was told this repeatedly, along with evidence showing why. But in this case we had an elected official with the inverse of Scotty’s model in mind—apply an absolutely insane and impossible deadline because that’s what “leadership” looks like.

And it’s not the first time this official has done it. I suspect there’s some thinking like, “This will show the taxpayers / voters that I’m focused on efficiency.” Ugh. It’s just silly. When teams do hit the impossible deadlines, their projects aren’t actually done anyway—the work goes on well past the deadline and tons of functionalities are missing. And when teams miss the deadlines, they are made to feel bad about it. No one wins in this approach. I wish I could stop it or explain how damaging this is to all the teams involved. But there really isn’t anything I can do. Frustrating. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Code for America Summit 2025

It’s official! I’m registered for this year’s Code for America Summit in Washington, DC along with 3 colleagues. It’s the only conference I’m likely to attend this year, so I might as well make it the best one. I’m a little disappointed it’s only 2 days, but delighted we’re booked and heading out on Wed, May 28.

Will it be May 14?

Right now, our GX Concourse team is targeting Wednesday, May 14 as the launch date for our fully-revised “One Franklin County” website, taking the first 14 agencies live on a new platform and shutting down all their independent websites. Sadly, I plan to be out of town, but even if I’m away I will pay very close attention to the launch and will do what I can to assist. It feels like there’s an impossibly long list of tasks to complete in the next 6 weeks, so the deadline feels too close. But any date will feel “too close” because the launch is so big. We’ll see how the next couple weeks go as folks let the date sink in.

The Phoenix Project… rises again

Our first book club session with a rollicking big group of about 20 was this week and it was a great start. I first brought this book to a small reading group in late 2019 / early 2020 back when our organization was as much as disaster as the fictional Parts Unlimited in the book. Now that the worst of the organization’s mess has been cleaned up, I’m curious to see where the conversation leads with this cross-functional group. We’ve got our customer relations folks, project managers, and business analysts (plus a few others) at the table this time. We have plenty we can improve in the organization (of course), but where will the conversation lead us?

I was thinking back this week about the various book clubs I’ve led at FCDC so far:

• The Phoenix Project (2019)
• Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
• Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
• Hack Your Bureaucracy
• The Phoenix Project (2025)

I suspect this let’s-read-a-book-and-talk-about-it thing stems from my academic leanings. Hell, I taught high school for a year (before I realized that was a mistake and got out). But I always wonder whether everyone gets out of these sessions what I get out of them. I hope so.

Our Phoenix Project book club will continue across 7 sessions, ending in July.

Blog updates and future leadership / turnaround series

I changed up the site a bit over the last week. Tweaked some of the layouts and structure. And I started to post “essays” separately from the weeknotes. Example: My post this week on the WatchCats podcast discussing the gutting of USDS.

Also thinking about a series of culture leadership and “turnaround” pieces. I’m assembling a curated list of advice for leaders and managers—stuff I’ve collected from books, articles, past jobs, and just personal mantras I’ve developed over the years. I’m tempted to post that stuff to Medium or Substack where they might get more traction. But just for simplicity, I’ll probably leave it here on WordPress and duplicate the posts to LinkedIn (which has a really effective interaction model).

Linknotes

• Wendy Jameson posted a link to this Apolitical story this week, and it’s pretty good: Trust vs Digital Transformation: Can Governments Close the Gap?
  • This reinforces ideas I shared on the GX Foundry blog back in February: Fixing trust belongs at the top of local government To Do lists
• I love me a good let’s-get-real-about-AI post. In this case CNN (surprisingly) had this juicy headline: Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown. Apple has been getting spanked lately because their marketing got way out ahead of their AI capabilities, and what they promised to ship during the iOS 18 series is being delayed, possibly indefinitely.
  • If you want a truly brilliant and unsparing takedown of Apple’s flubs with AI this past year, look no further than longtime Apple blogger/analyst John Gruber with his epic piece: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
  • Meanwhile, I’ve been doing more personal experimentation with AI, and when it comes to simple web-based research and generating common text, all the tools out there are pretty great. Still not taking over the world, though.
• I’ve been exploring the Craft app as a possible centralization of my to-dos, notes, and vital calendar items. But I’m wary of starting another cycle of “organizing” things rather than just doing things and getting them done. I am prone to spending too much time on method and not enough time on outcomes.
• I recently picked up the Aer City Pack Pro 2 backpack and have been using it for a few weeks now. It’s really too big as an EDC for me, but I’m thinking I may try to take it on the Code for America trip at the end of May. If I can one-bag that trip with an under-seat backpack like this… oh, baby! I’ve been singing the praises of Aer bags at work lately, and have at least 2 compatriots who have other Aer products.

---

About this week’s header photo