2025 Weeknote 42 : A spicy competition

Weeknotes 6 Minutes

October 13 – 19

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

  • This week included a fun event at the office: A Chili Cook-Off. I didn’t have an entry (I’m no cook), but it was a well-attended event that beats the pants off any ordinary office potluck. There were judges, amusing names for the chilis, and some minor prizes (mostly bragging rights). This was the third and the best so far. Photos below.
  • Another great event this week—one I wasn’t able to attend due to a scheduling conflict—was an in-house custom training for project managers (and a few others) on how to develop Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) when leading project efforts. This is a fundamental function of a PM, but for some reason we’ve always been pretty bad at this. In part this is because engineers and customers are naturally allergic to planning to any level of detail, but it’s also been my experience our PMs have been unwilling to be assertive or even borderline aggressive to get plans down on paper, likely in fear of violating some unwritten rule that you can’t “upset” other teams in our culture. But that fear of bumping up against imagined norms has held back our project management maturity development for years. Without WBS-level planning, estimates are impossible and any kind of commitments are mere folly. I am so proud of the team—and especially their manager—for coming together to address this issue head-on, rather than letting it slip any further. If we can improve our WBS work, we can improve project efforts immensely in the months to come.
  • We also held our second-ever all-leadership (from managers up through execs) meeting. This series started after discussions over the summer revealed managers felt disconnected from the execs in general and wanted to hear more about the organization, work efforts, and so forth. It’s still a work in progress, but so far… pretty good. The only challenge is that we lack a culture that natively understands that for every 1 hour of a meeting you’re running, it takes at least 2 hours of preparation. Holding a 3-hour meeting monthly takes a ton of effort if we want to make it consistently valuable.
  • I facilitated a technical discovery session this week with a small team from the Sheriff’s office that handles video surveillance and analysis systems. I continue to be surprised by the highly technical systems they acquire and deploy without our teams’ direct engagement. A lot of the tech comes from grants or other funds, and there’s a lot of neat technology in the law enforcement space generally. Stuff I saw this week was reminiscent of the 2011-2016 TV series Person of Interest. Anyway… our small team was able to listen to the Sheriff team’s needs, elicit some additional details, and figure out how we can help.
  • On Friday I declared “email bankruptcy” for all dates prior to July 1, 2025, archiving literally everything—even stuff I had flagged for follow-up. Then I processed all the remaining messages from July forward to today. Shockingly, I’ve done pretty good keeping up with stuff since July, so the cleanup was faster than I expected. I dropped from nearly 700 unread messages to less than 10 in just a few hours. Of course, that means a lot of stuff I had intended to handle prior to July is now lost to the sands of email time, but the fact is I just can’t fully act on everything that comes my way. Sad, but true.

Topology 2026

At the end of this week I finally initiated a 10-person team that will investigate Team Topologies and related concepts in an effort to discover whether we might reorganize our teams around value streams and products rather than grouping everyone into technical skill clusters.

My thoughts started with the “squad model” made famous many years ago by Spotify (which they have since vigorously disowned). We even learned that CODE PA was using a version of the squad model. But I’ve grown far more interested in Team Topologies because it’s a complete model, it’s actively being developed and supported by a global community, and it’s rooted in principles I already know from other areas.

I’ll be convening the group in roughly the next week or two, and announcing it more broadly this coming week, so everyone knows what’s going on, who’s on the team, and so forth.

For the record, this group of 10 is is less than 50% than the 25 total people in my corner of the broader organization. It’s more people than I might normally include (just for efficiency reasons), but I wanted to include at least 1 staff member from each team as well as each manager. Why? A couple reasons.

First, including staff keeps leadership blind spots under control. Second, staff participation allows for a natural dissemination of ideas and discussions across the teams, out in the open. While these will be private talks, they aren’t a secret and staff participation underlines that commitment.

Third, there’s the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, which tells me I’m looking for “Innovators” and “Early Adopters,” or at least members of the “Early Majority” to participate. Exploring new ideas requires openness to those new ideas and a willingness to mentally experiment with new futures, and the folks on the left side of the distribution are vital, and we have that available in both our management and staff.

This will be a long series of discussions and readings and investigations. I’m deep into Team Topologies, digging into Domain-Driven Design now, learning about Wardley Mapping, and I’m bringing my past experience with OODA loop thinking to the table, Daniel Pink’s exploration of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose, the aforementioned Law of Diffusion of Innovation, and of course concepts from Lean and Kanban and value streams, as well. Just tonight I picked up a book released last month by Susanne Kaiser (Architecture for Flow: Adaptive Systems with Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping, and Team Topologies), whose full conceptual model is on view on YouTube here.

This stuff is dense, conceptual, and—hopefully—valuable even for a small team. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Professional links

Personal weeknotes

  • This week was my HOA’s annual meeting, where I’m an elected board member. Went well. We’re talking about adding online payments but haven’t yet settled on how to do that (and yeah, that’s gonna fall to me). I’ve been on our board for many years now, and thankfully it’s not the drama-infused chaos you hear about on investigative news programs. We’re pretty chill.
  • I’m still monitoring health matters from my parents up north. Had a little bit of a health scare this week that was resolved into something pretty innocuous by mid-Saturday. So… that’s better. But there’s still soooo much to do. We have a family gathering next weekend in Louisville to start to plan the “next phase,” whatever that may be. The core problem? Sounds like it may be the overall cognitive load of handling a spouse with dementia, the contracted services from multiple providers, and handling personal health in the midst of everything else. It’s just too much for someone closing in on 90 years old. But… we haven’t yet gotten agreement on that. How do you convince a stubborn 88-year old they need help?

About this week’s header photo

Judging for the 3rd annual chili cook-off was serious. In this photo one of the judges is evaluating a sample across multiple dimensions of the chili experience. In the end, first and second places went to new employees with first-time entrants. I’m withholding their identities in case there’s a doping scandal. LOL

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