2024 Weeknote 50

December 9 – 15

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

Sick-ish week

I spent the week recovering from some kind of cold. Worked remotely the first 3 days. Got back to the office on Thursday (but was exhausted by the end of the day). Then things were more or less back to normal on Friday.

It’s the first time I’ve been sick in about 18 months. The last infection was COVID-19 in June 2023. This time the symptoms were milder and while testing over 4 days every result was negative, so it wasn’t COVID this time. 2023 was the first and only time I’ve had COVID, as I avoided it throughout the core pandemic. Indeed, since the arrival of COVID-19 in early 2020, I’ve only been sick twice in those 4+ years. That’s a big reduction from my pre-pandemic rate of general illnesses of perhaps 2-3 times per year.

Anyhoo… on the upswing now so next week should more or less be normal.

Leadership changes

This week we announced a small package of team leadership changes. Our Delivery Services group (project managers and business analysts) was shuffled a bit, to give the current manager more time to run a critical project for the next several months.

Announcing changes like this to staff is always tricky, but it seemed to go okay. We worked for a few weeks to figure out how to structure the change in a way that balances all the constituencies, validated it, and finalized a plan with the relevant leaders. This moves a lot of cheese for a lot of people, so introducing this change requires both direct, empathetic and honest communication and genuine openness to feedback.

As part of this package of changes, I took on 3 additional direct reports (all project managers) taking my total to 8. At least for now. That’s too many direct reports to lead particularly well, but some of the folks are largely self-sufficient and, well… it’s still the best balance of the options (which I won’t get into here).

Perhaps the hardest part of these kinds of changes is keeping in mind how the message is received by the affected teams. As a leader, you spend so much time thinking about the structural or strategic needs of the team or the organization, it’s easy to forget that your actions get interpreted, often in a negative light, so it requires extra care to provide a ton of context for the decision and change.

Now begins the Tetris game of redesigning my calendar to adapt to the additional leadership load and more oversight of project work. I am ready for the 2 holiday weeks coming up—I need the time to rejigger everything.

2025 GX+ and DS+ Seasons are set

In 2024 we started to use a “seasons” model with the GX Foundry. We’ve now extended that to the Delivery Services team. And thankfully the county’s Print Shop team was able to produce some nice full-bleed 11×17 posters we can share with everyone so they have the entire year-at-a-glance at their desks.

I may need to do a full post over the GX Foundry site to explain what we’re doing here. But the shortest-possible version is this:

• We break work periods up into 8-week sessions we call a “Season”
• The 8-week period starts with 1 week of prep, and ends with 1 week of wrap
• Each week is an “Episode” in the Season, similar to TV
• This is kinda like a “super-Agile” grouping of time that’s big enough to allow for meaningful work to be done, without being too long to forget priorities
• Much of this is built on concepts in Shape Up from 37signals
• No, it’s not a perfect fit for all the teams or proejcts, but it still allows us to batch up priorities and work and then defend those priorities for the work period, starting again each 8 weeks

I could go on. For now I just wanted to call out the calendars are done and we’ve distributed them. This is harder than it looks!

Sentencing technical debt to death

Dramatic title, no? 🙂 But that’s something that happened this week. I publicly announced the death of an ancient piece of tech called the “Employee Portal.” Think “intranet” in old-school terms. Built on ColdFusion (yes, that one) more than a decade ago, it’s been getting support from our team for all that time, but usage has been falling for a long time and the tech is outdated.

Additionally, there’s no political or financial appetite for a portal or intranet service that can cover our 6,000 county employees. I made a pitch for a new “employee experience” portal for 2025, but it was shot down. The consequence is we announce the old portal is being shutdown at the end of 2025… and we won’t replace it.

Our agencies will have to decide what they want to do for their own employees. We won’t be running a portal for them. We can help them get started with Teams or (shudder) SharePoint, but outside of that we won’t run a central offering. Maybe county leadership will change its mind in the future, but not anytime soon.

Collateral damage

One of the side effects of killing off the Employee Portal is there are 20+ mini-web-apps that were built on top of that platform, and all those must be killed off, too.

In this case, we will likely help agencies build replacements with newer tech. But in some cases the apps will simply be retired with no replacement.

All this was announced in our countywide “Tech Roundtable” in a presentation I gave this week. We got no feedback, but this was just the warning shot across the bow. Conversations with the agencies start up soon to begin to chart a unique path for each team.

Dismantling a rogue IT infrastructure

One of the projects I’ve been circling around (but not doing myself) has been an effort to “collapse” a bunch of shadow or rogue IT developed in one of the agencies over the past 20 years. We’re dismantling the whole thing, with the bulk of the work being completed this weekend. By the time you see this, the worst will be over.

My Delivery Services team is involved, but really this is a big effort for the Enterprise Technology group (my old stomping grounds) as they bring down an independent Windows domain, shutdown a parallel virtualization environment, move more than 100 users and their PCs, applications, and printers over to the core county platform, and transition a public-facing website, domain registration, and public DNS to our standard systems. All our security controls, tools, and configurations now apply, too.

Thinking back… this project took 4 years to make it to this point. The political wrangling to get it moving has been frustrating to say the least. This rogue operation has wasted time and money on duplicative tech for a long time. (Although I must admit there was a time period in the past where my current employer was… not very good at providing support for the tech they deployed, so a rogue operation may have been the only way to ensure a quality experience for employees.)

It’s satisfying to actually get some good, fundamental work done on behalf of the taxpayers here and there. All hail our Enterprise Technology friends! That’s a thankless job that, when done well, is invisible. (Nobody calls the plumber when the toilet flushes normally.)

Just a couple links this week

Man, I love the folks at 18F. They are the bomb. Just this super-short post came out recently and I love it and the little attachments, too. This is great if you’re looking for ways to standardize approaches to projects (be they digital or otherwise), so you can communicate key facts to all the players in a consistent way.

• 18F project defaults — https://18f.gsa.gov/2024/12/05/2024-12-5-18f-project-defaults/

Originally shared by Emily Webber, this is a great piece for managers / leaders that work with high-performing individuals. Applicable whether you just have one superstar, or multiple, or if you are the superstar that needs to be engaged. Keep in mind one of the hallmarks of a high-performer is they are self-starters. So you can actually keep yourself engaged and growing, even if your boss is oblivious. Just don’t do that forever—head out to greener pastures every so often if your boss isn’t helping you grow.

• How to keep high performers engaged and growing — https://leaddev.com/management/how-keep-high-performers-engaged-growing