May 13-19

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. Subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

Only 23 meetings

The life of a manager/leader doesn’t always feel productive. The days of being an individual contributor—when you could see and feel the work you were producing—are gone, and it’s hard to tell whether what you’re doing is making a difference.

This past week I had at least 23 scheduled meetings, not to mention impromptu hallway conversations and of course tons of instant messaging sessions and some calls. I did some “work” here and there, but it was disjointed.

Over time, I’ve gotten more comfortable with this style of work, but I’ve never been (and likely never will be) fully comfortable with it.

The next 2 weeks coming up will feel even stranger. I have a full calendar in the coming week and a conference week after that. I won’t be “productive” again (it seems) until June.

Another changing of the guard

Last week I noted that I was taking on an additional team in the organization. That expanded my organizational responsibility by 7 roles. This week I’m adding 1 more role to the mix.

This should stabilize any structural changes on my teams for now. For the future, some key questions I have to consider:

• What is the right balance, for us, between Business Analysis capacity and Project Management capacity?

• What is the right balance, for us, between Product Ownership capacity and UX Research capacity?

• Are Business Analysts best “seated” with the teams/products/technologies they are analyzing, or are they best lined up with the Project Managers? That is, do you “embed” BA abilities closer to the services or keep them generalized with “delivery” folks?

I quietly reached out to U.S. Digital Response recently to see if I could get some consulting time to discuss our structures and role breakdown, to see what others and doing and figure out the best path forward for our specific situation. We’ll see if something comes of that.

Don’t Make Me Think

Years ago I read the great design / UI / UX book Don’t Make Me Think (now in its 3rd edition). I thought of that this week based on a post by UK digital government consultant and thinker Matt Jukes.

Matt released a great post just today about his concerns around Product Management and how it’s developed a mixed reputation in the last year or so. He then goes into his concerns around how frameworks can become problematic.

Hard agreement. I love frameworks! But I never treat them like straight jackets.

The best frameworks are ones that are fully aware of their own limitations. Kanban is probably one of the best at this (though not as pushed by David Anderson, who has gone too far in making things complex and doctrinaire). “Agile,” as promoted by the Scrum Alliance and others, is probably the worst offender. The PMP is also an indoctrination mess.

We need folks to focus on outcomes and choose methods that help them get the best tradeoffs between efforts and results. And boy, is this hard to explain to staff. So many folks want a “right” way to do things so they can just do the work and go home unencumbered with additional thoughts. It often feels like “Don’t Make Me Think” is the unspoken mantra.

Yet the most effective folks I’ve worked with in any industry and in any role have been those that question the why of a project or service, who are self-reflective, who can keep the destination in mind while orienteering their way through a dense forest of distractions.

I’m not sure how to teach the curiosity and desire for great outcomes over just “doing work” that’s parallel to our goals. If I ever figure that out, I’ll have to write a book.

Miscellanea

• We continued our leadership training series with Business of People this week. Gotta say, these folks know what they are doing. Most of the ideas are repackaged good advice from lots of different sources, but the organization of the ideas and the facilitation is top-notch and there are real tools in this toolbox, unlike most other leadership development programs I’ve seen in the past.

• The We Are #FCDC story series is getting a new installment in the next week or so and I am not ready! It is amazing to me how much energy it takes to develop these kinds of pieces and how few people understand the commitment required.

• It feels like I’ve been successful at flipping our biweekly reporting model for the “CIO Report” into something new and more valuable. Our collective teams are a lot more judicious in what they are reporting out. Good stuff.

• Part of my takeover of the project management space has been conducting a “listening tour” to figure out what everyone is thinking. It’s been illuminating, although I can tell not everyone is comfortable sharing their true thoughts. At least not yet. I’ve scheduled a team meeting for June 14 to reveal what I’ve learned and outline a path forward.

Photo Blog

I run a separate personal photo blog over at Photonic Teleportation, if you’re interested. Not related to my work (generally). This week I’m starting a series on my 4,000-mile road trips to and from Alaska between 1996 and 2013.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

May 6-12

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. Subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

[INSERT TORNADO SIREN HERE]

Late on May 7 a potential tornado came to my neighborhood. As it turns out, nothing touched the ground, but it’s the closest call I’ve had in the 10 years I’ve lived here.

It was also the first time since the 1970s that I sheltered in a basement as a precaution, with a wife, 2 cats, and a dog along for the ride.

But man… what a difference 40+ years makes in meteorological data and prediction…

Every geography has some kind of natural disaster threat. The most terrifying in Ohio is the tornado. For more than 12 years living in Alaska, it was earthquakes. And I prefer the earthquakes. Watching this air mass develop 50 miles away and slowly drift in your direction is anxiety-producing in a way that earthquakes can never be.

A changing of the guard

A bit of a change at the office this week had me preoccupied.

I’m now in charge of our organization’s “delivery services” function, on top of our digital services group, the GX Foundry.

There were many reasons for this change, as you might imagine. And it’s not appropriate to share all of those reasons publicly, as it was a nuanced decision that would not make sense without a whole lot of context I can’t provide efficiently.

But the short version is this: our Delivery Services team (formerly the Project Management Office, or PMO) is one of the last teams in our now-nearly-100 person organization to get an opportunity at a cultural and operational transformation. And they deserve that chance to invent a new, positive team culture and future like so many others have gotten before them.

A bit of history… Our organization was, in early 2019, a mess. The 40-some employees still present after years of attacks from an ideological politician and a series of weak leaders were either defensive and suspicious or jaded. Our new (and actually good) CIO arrived in March 2019, and I arrived in August 2019. He initiated a whole-organization reboot, and I did my part by starting a turnaround in the IT infrastructure area. It took a while and a lot of positive new hiring along the way, but we got to a far better place. Even the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t stop our transformation.

I repeated that cultural overhaul in our digital services are in the last couple years (it really took off in 2023). And now we can, finally, do the same thing for the project management folks, who labored under a clandestinely toxic boss that left only a year ago, followed by a series of unrelated leadership changes that kept things up in the air longer than we would have liked.

So I get the honor and privilege of working with the team to bring them into the positive culture we’ve been growing in the rest of the organization for the past 5 years. It ain’t gonna be easy to shake off the old culture. And there are open questions about how we run projects operationally. But we can do it—we can dig in, figure things out, and built a great new culture.

I’ve done it twice already. Third time’s the charm.

24 years of work = 38% complete

Speaking of years of work, I got this notice via LinkedIn this week:

That’s my father. He’s not a social media maven, to be sure. But hey, he’s out there! And apparently he surpassed 24 years at his current employer this week. Sounds amazing, right? Well not really.

What’s actually amazing: He’s 86 years old. And yes, he’s still working full-time. He puts in as many or more hours each week as I do. And 24 years is just 38% of his working life. So far.

Indeed, he had at least 18 years at Owens-Illinois when I was a kid. He had years at the Timken company. And stints at International Paper, Battelle, and loads of other companies. He’s been working continuously as a mechanical engineer in various roles since around 1960—that’s 64 years for those keeping score.

He could retire. But he won’t. He refuses.

So congratulations, Dad, on 24 years. They better throw you a party at 25 years.

Miscellanea

• I spent an off-site day with our leadership team developing our work visualization and prioritization methods. This will also drive 2025 staffing and budget requests.

• Along with two colleagues I presented a breakout session at the annual Quickbase user conference on how we used their platform to solve “Unclaimed Funds” problems for the county Auditor’s office.

• We worked on challenges around procuring Atlassian software products for ourselves and our customers. It’s wild how difficult local government officials choose to make software acquisition, all in the name of “protecting” the public. It’s preposterous on a scale I’ve never experienced, whether in small businesses or multi-billion-dollar corporations.

• After completing “Season 2” of the GX Foundry’s new-for-2024 work calendar a couple weeks back, I’m prepping a brief summary presentation for our “Tech Roundtable” meeting with customers next week. I think most people think we’re crazy for doing this, but it feels like it’s working for the most part. Season 2 was very productive.

• I’m continuing my weekly photo posting blog over on Photonic Teleportation and shared some downtown Columbus shots from a recent sunny afternoon.

Internet funnies

And now a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

Finally this week, what may very well be the funniest political story of the year: the revelation that RFK, Jr. claims to have had a parasitic worm get into his brain and die. The jokes and memes came on fast and furious and it was glorious. My favorite of the week, perhaps given my Children’s Literature minor…

April 29-May 5

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. Subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

What a week. And weekend.

So. Many. Mission Patches.

For the past several weeks I’ve spent time at work, but mostly at home, building up a collection of nearly 70 mission patches for all the teams in our organization, looking back at 2023 accomplishments. And this weekend, in fact just today (Sun, 5/5) I finally finished. Whew!

My own team did this mission patch work at the turn of the year (19 patches), then it caught on, and I’ve been leading the charge to get awards identified and patches built for teams in security, infrastructure, finance, and administration. I knew it would be a lot of work. But I hadn’t anticipated how much of it I would have to do myself.

In the end we will print a few hundred individual patches (stickers) and distribute them to our various teams, celebrating the bigger wins from 2023.

I’m pleased with the results and can’t wait to get them all printed and then the fun of distributing them! We will also create “mission walls” for each team and large copies of the patches will be printed and stuck to the walls, too.

Story Card #2 is done

I wasn’t sure I could pull it off so fast, but I did.

I was able to…

• interview a staff member on Monday, looking for a unique story to tell, then draft their story Monday night

• finalize the text and design on Tuesday, then send it to the Print Shop

• get the printed Story Cards back on Thursday, ready for distribution this coming week.

• post the story on LinkedIn over the weekend

Wild! I labored for so long on the first one. But with the storytelling class done and one Story Card under my belt, the second came along much faster. Of course, having a tight deadline helped, too.

Atlassian’s big week

Boy, Atlassian had a big week. They had their annual conference in Las Vegas, and announced several changes in their product lineup, some of which will help us in our development. We also had 2 of our staff at the conference—and we didn’t even pay their way! That is some crazy level of dedication on their part. Props to them for sure.

But while Atlassian was announcing the combination of Jira Software and Jira Work Management into (just) “Jira” we were discussing our own future work management tooling and reached the conclusion that Jira was indeed our destination and we would begin to collapse nearly all other tools in favor of Atlassian’s stack (although not Trello). It took 2-3 months to reach the decision, but we got there. Now the real work starts.

Miscellanea

First baseball game of 2024!

It was an eventful week in other ways, too, but time is running out this Sunday evening and I need to move on. I have an 8:00am meeting at the office in the morning. (Ugh!)

More next week.

Internet funnies

Finally, a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

April 22-28

These are my “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. Subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

Most of the past week was spent digging into some of the bigger themes that will dominate my attention over the next few months: building staffing plans and changing up how our teams manage their work visibly and collaboratively.

Meanwhile, we hosted a nicely-done Take Your Child to Work Day event this past week. I don’t have kids, but this was fun to see around the office.

Big aspirations require “big” staffing boost

In prepping for 2025 budget season (yes, it’s ridiculously early) I’ve been building and refining a list of project staffing needs. Many of the items on the list are aspirational, and some of them stretch out into 2026 and even 2027. But when all the staff asks and ideas are combined, it’s a bit shocking to see.

Today my team is about 16 people. But my proposals for consideration would, over the next few years, add up to 40 people to the team. That’s 150% growth over 2+ years. It sounds shocking, even to me, except…

• Today we’re only staffed to barely sustain what we have, and can’t really tackle any big new issues or goals. The technical debt load is… well, it’s a lot.

• We haven’t really started any digital transformation efforts in earnest (we have a few small examples), despite formation of the GX Foundry. If the county wants transformation, it’s going to take a lot more people to execute that work.

• Our overall organization—FCDC—grew more than 130% in the last 4 years, and most of that growth was to cover for technical debt and sustainability of systems, so big growth is not unprecedented. Plus, all the growth was in our security and infrastructure areas, not digital services.

• Our total FCDC team—about 97 today—builds and maintains systems that support roughly 6,000 users (to one degree or another)—so we are just 1.6% of the total employee base—a criminally-low number for teams that build IT infrastructure, maintain cybersecurity, and support key software platforms.

• Finally, I don’t expect the powers-that-be will support growth at this rate anyway. I’ll take 100% growth over 2 years if I can get it.

One of the hallmarks of my list, by the way, is to make recommendations to the county, not wait for requests. If we wait for the county’s various agencies to ask for digital transformation, we’ll be waiting a very, very long time. We have to propose it, evangelize it, gather the support and get the resources. Then we have to prove out the value (which is fairly easy to do).

But there is one glimmer of hope today. An active project with the Sheriff’s office is building demand by proving out the value of killing paper forms and paper processing. A tiny team inside the Sheriff is getting results from working with us, and it’s getting a little bit of attention. That’s where we need to lean in to the small projects to make big points about the value we can deliver.

Transforming our own work management

Another leadership conversation boomeranged into view this past week: How should we, across all our teams, organize and visualize our work? We have a laundry list of digital tools in place today, collected over the last few years—some of which I was instrumental in introducing. But the cacophony of tools and the different needs of the teams has fractured where work is tracked and discussed, making centralized visualization, coordination, and management difficult or—really— impossible.

So in recent months the proposal has surfaced that we reduce the tools and standardize. This has caused some consternation. But it’s the right thing to do. Here’s a brief before/after view:

Before: 7 tools

• AgilePlace (formerly LeanKit) for work visualization in a Kanban-based framework

• Harvest for time tracking / billing

• Forecast for capacity planning

• Smartsheet for detailed project management that doesn’t fit the Kanban model

• Jira Service Management for request and incident management

• Jira Work Management for selected project management efforts

• Trello is used by some individuals and teams as well for work management

After (if approved): 3 tools

• Jira Software for work visualization / project management

  • Eliminate Smartsheet

  • Eliminate Jira Work Management

  • Eliminate Trello

  • Eliminate AgilePlace

• Jira Service Management for request and incident management

• Harvest for time tracking / billing (for now)

  • Eliminate Forecast (because we never really got it going anyway)

Making these kinds of changes has an impact on teams and leaders and requires retooling in some cases. But if we proceed, it will also enable new tools and behaviors. The question is: Can we get it done?

If we can, our GX Platforms team will lead the way, helping teams to make the transition.

Internet funnies

Finally, a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

April 15-21

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

It was a weird week.

I came in from a couple days off for seeing the eclipse, then being away for a conference in DC. Then BAM! I was in 2 days of leadership meetings that culminated in axes being thrown around. Then back to “work” after that.

Leadership meetings

Monday (4/15) was an all-day session to talk about work in progress, work expected to be done through the rest of 2024, and work expected in 2025+ from across the entire leadership team. Well, except me. My list was too long for us to fit in, so we’re discussing it in the coming week.

The general idea is we need to map out work vs. resources and prep for 2025 budgeting (starting now — ugh), which includes asking for headcount where needed.

Budget: woe

Budgeting is made very difficult in our county because customers (agencies) create their budgets in parallel to ours, and we don’t know what technology requests are in their budgets until ours is pretty much done. Adding to that is the complication of elected officials who decide what they want to do long after budgets are set. We’ve had multi-million dollar tech efforts hit us without warning well outside annual budget cycles. It naturally catches us flat-footed. But if you ask for resources in anticipation of a potential workload, you get denied (which isn’t crazy—you don’t want to staff up for work that never materializes).

After 5 years of this, I’m pretty sanguine about it. Truth is, it’s not realistic for just about any organization today to plan their spending 18+ months ahead, except for routine maintenance expenses. We’re all making decisions rapidly based on the latest input or strategic shifts or elections or regulatory changes, and so on. When people say the world moves faster today, it’s not just an idle observation.

Further, I don’t think the agencies and elected officials are wrong to behave in the way they do—making last-minute decisions. I believe the budgeting process itself is out of step with real-world business processes. The right thing to do would be to develop a multi-layered budgeting process with different time horizons for different expense types. You might plan maintenance costs up to 24 months out. But project expenses should probably on time horizons of just 6-9 months. And everyone needs to maintain a healthy “rainy day” fund. Because it rains a lot and our forecasting is not great.

But that’s just my $0.02. I know there are other opinions out there.

Team-building + leadership dev

The second day of all-day meetings (4/16) was half leadership development, half team-building. We used axes for the team building, and shockingly, no blood was spilled! It was actually my first time with the axe-throwing fad that’s been going around the last decade. Not bad.

As for leadership development, I don’t have a lot to share here, as much of that is fairly confidential. Suffice it to say it’s gonna be an interesting few months, seeing how this plays out.

Site re-launch: franklincountyohio.gov

Once back in the office, attention turned to launching our first citizen-centric / services-focused website using the Granicus OpenCities hosted platform.

We announced it on LinkedIn, and I’ll share more notes about it over on the GX Foundry site. But my short hot takes are:

• Congratulations to Sarah Gray and Caitlyn Coughlin on a job well-done! Sarah, in particular, has been the fearless leader we needed, with an eye for CX and a public servant’s heart.

• The site is really just a sort of “index” or a links collection right now, replacing the prior site at the same address that served the same function, so this really is just Step 1 in a long series of actions that will totally transform the county’s online presence.

• The real work wasn’t getting the site launched. It was…

  • doing the emotional labor of pulling together the 15 starter agencies in a supportive, but directed way

  • collaborating with the vendor

  • deciding how to organize the county services represented

• Now that we’re launched, we can probably speed up later phases of work, based on what we’ve learned. (But we’re not sure our vendor will be able to keep up.)

Headed to Code for America Summit for the first time, and taking a team

Speaking of digital government services… I and three of our team will be attending the Code for America Summit for the very first time at the end of May. We even registered and booked travel this week. A full four of us flying from Columbus to San Francisco (Oakland), staying in the same hotel, attending the same conference, and flying back—that’s also a first. It should be a great experience, based on the newly-released session details.

One session of note talks about what New York City has been doing with their web presence:

The current NYC.gov experience was built 10 years ago and is modeled around the structure of government rather than residents’ needs. The NYC Digital Service team has been redesigning NYC.gov to move from an agency-first platform to one that serves New Yorkers first.

Uh… that’s what we’re doing! The site launch noted above is in that same vein.

This made me realize our work in the GX Foundry is on point. We’re not leading the industry by any means — we are fast followers. But we’re not as far behind as I felt like we were a couple years back. Government teams at all levels are at different places in their journey. We’re not the first, but we’re also not the last. That’s why we share what we’re learning along the way (and learn from others!).

Hot takes on AI

Overall, I think the generative AI stuff that’s been coming out over the past 18 months has been very interesting. But I don’t see world-changing technology on par with the Internet. So far the tech appears to be autocorrect that’s been handed some syntax processing info, a huge collection of source material (a lot of it illegally), and then set loose when following “prompts” (commands) from users. Interesting, evolutionary, but not world-changing. Yet.

So I am enjoying the increasing number of hot takes on AI that are taking it down a peg or two. The backlash is a trend now — part of the standard Gartner hype cycle, really. Here are just some of my recent faves…

Internet funnies

Finally, a random roundup of stuff that made me chuckle recently.

April 8-14

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

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My notes will be a little abbreviated this week due to 2 big events…

2024 Total Solar Eclipse

I was off work on Monday to view the eclipse out on the western edge of Ohio. I didn’t end up going to Texas due to weather—clouds in Ohio were predicted to be about the same or better than Texas, so why make the drive and pay for all the gas, hotels, and so forth?

I’ve posted photos and videos over on my updated weekly photo blog photonic teleportation. It was a great experience, and I’m so thankful the weather held out well enough to make it work. I’m not one of those people that claims it “changed my life” or anything like that — I just enjoy it a lot. What’s so crazy is that I saw the 2017 total solar eclipse, too. Didn’t think I’d experience two in such rapid succession.

The next eclipse to cross a big swath of the U.S. is in 2045, a full 21 years from now. I plan to still be alive then, but you never know.

CDSO conference in DC

The day after the eclipse I traveled to Washington, DC to attend a conference hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, focused on a handful of Chief Digital Service Officers (CDSOs) from federal, state, and local governments. Indeed, this conference was put on specifically by the Digital Service Network team at the Beeck Center.

With only about 25 of us in attendance, this was a pretty intense conference. It was also expertly hosted on the Georgetown campus by the DSN team, with a side-trip to the United States Digital Service (USDS) in their home base — the very secure Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) directly next to the White House.

Honestly, I’m exhausted by this week and have to prep a bunch of stuff for two days of off-site leadership meetings starting tomorrow, so I can’t recap the conference with too much detail right now. But there are a few brief takeaways I can share:

• I don’t know how the Beeck Center / DSN and the U.S. Digital Response teams are funded (I just haven’t explored this yet), but wow… they are funded. They are all running very well-organized, well-resourced teams with top-tier talent calling the shots. It’s impressive. I hope the funders keep the money flowing because the impact produced by these organizations is vital.

• All the problems / challenges we are experiencing in the GX Foundry are typical. Limited resources, too many demands on our time, inherited tech and policy decisions that blunt service effectiveness… all of it is “normal.” That doesn’t mean it’s right, it’s just that we have plenty of company.

• The public servants working on developing digital government practices are the vanguard of government service generally. The quality of talent, the dedication to improving public service, and the relentless self-imposed pressure to improve is astonishing. I knew there were good people working hard to make a difference, but I didn’t realize it was this intense (and heartwarming!).

• Digital Service Standards are not new, but they are not as widely deployed as I would have expected in the American government space. Even USDS doesn’t have them today. Danny Mintz from Code for America came in to talk about Standards, and there’s a lot to do here—this is a rich area for exploration. The Brits have had it forever now. We need to do something similar.

• The difference between State and Local governments is substantial when it comes to digital services, and the needs of those two levels are more divergent than I expected. The only State that felt like it was close to my own large County experience was Delaware, probably because it’s only got about 1M people — the same as Franklin County. Future efforts to share resources and ideas across digital government teams may need to stratify by size and complexity of team.

DC is a character in the American story

When not in a charged-up conference session, I was enjoying being in DC in the spring time, before the heat and humidity chokes the city for months on end. I walked a lot, used the Metro, took in a White House East Wing tour, and attended a concert at the Kennedy Center.