2025 Weeknote 46 : Cliffhanger

November 10 – 16

📆 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.

I will be brief this week. I am battling a lot of different work tasks in the evenings and weekends right now, and I just don’t have time for a lot of blogging.

Professional weeknotes

• I had a ton of conversations this past week related to the 3 staff departures announced within the last 3 weeks. And even more conversations about the IT Project Manager job we posted publicly. Suffice it to say I have some decisions to make, and I will have to act quickly. So stay tuned. I’ll have more to say next week.
• Meanwhile, the second session of my Team Topologies group was this past week. We focused on gathering the “problems” we have as teams and as a broader organization. We want to use these problems as guideposts as we consider our options for re-shaping our teams, our focus, and maybe even elements of our mission.
• I was able to get some whiteboarding time with colleagues this week, working on mapping out a plan to handle a messy facility go-live that an agency wants to happen in December (it’s not gonna make it), because they have a lease expiring in late January. Always fun to elicit requirements, organize stuff, and whiteboard it out.

I think that’s all I want to share for this week. More to come, of course.

Professional links

Again, this week has been a blur of conversations and figuring things out. So I didn’t have time to pick up any new articles or resources out there.

Personal weeknotes

• My parents came down on Sunday (11/16) for a brief visit. This have been mostly quiet lately, though I remain concerned about them. Thanksgiving is coming up, and we’ll be up there to spend some time then, along with some parts of the extended family.

• I shared this on LinkedIn over the weekend… Alaska station that covered devastating storm cuts jobs. This is an NPR story from Alaska about KYUK, the public radio & TV station in Bethel that I visited several times during my public media days, helping out with some IT matters. Those brief experiences taught me a lot. I cannot overstate how vital public radio is in rural Alaska—it’s not some drive-time coffee-mug-selling affair like it is in the cities and suburbs of the Lower 48. Or even Anchorage or Fairbanks. And what’s wild is Bethel is a “big” town out in the bush. There are far smaller communities and stations out there even more dependent on public radio. I helped out the station in Talkeetna, too (KTNA)—another vital local service (but at least they’re on the road system). These stations will need a lot of State of Alaska help to survive, given the federal cuts initiated by Trump and his Republicans in Congress. Say whatever you want about the culture wars around NPR and PBS… out in the Alaska backcountry, off the road system, these stations are a lifeline that transcend any political concerns. They must be saved.

About this week’s header photo