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.
Telling the story of our storytelling
We launched the first FCDC newsletter this week, featuring the story I wrote about Piper, a dog adopted by one of our teammates who was volunteering at the dog shelter and couldn’t resist. This is an experiment, to see if these kinds of stories resonate. We’re also handing out printed cards with this story on them starting this coming week.
Meanwhile, the monthly report plan has been put on pause for retooling. A few problems came up, with the primary one being that most of the topics the boss wants to talk about with county leaders are topics the rest of us know nothing about — it’s stuff he is working on, so we can’t develop a report for him. Additionally, many of the topics are not appropriate for public distribution, so… it will be smaller, private, and focused on county political considerations, not accomplishments from our various teams. Accomplishments will still figure into the content, but it will play a smaller part.
Maybe one day we will tell stories about our accomplishments openly, but not today. We’ll stick to the more emotional storytelling for now. Which is fine. I need the practice. (And I’m relieved to give up some of this work.)
Grab bag of updates
We finally got training on the OpenCities content management platform we’re using to re-launch our public-facing websites, starting in less than a month. It’s a complex system, but on par with others in the field. It’s going to be interesting to see how the agencies deal with learning it and working within its limitations.
An internal team made an initial pitch on moving all our work management and project management efforts into a single tool (Jira), away from the multi-tool mess we have today. The conversation continues, but it seems to be headed in the right direction.
We’re finally launching a proper Change Management process, based on Jira, next week. It’s taken months to get here. Should have gone much faster. But coordinating action and moving everyone’s cheese is hard.
Speaking of coordinating action, we had a serious meltdown this week when one team launched a whole new process and software tool that deeply impacted other teams, despite warnings it would not go well and we needed to collaborate a helluva lot more before going live. This event has deeply broken inter-team trust, and it will have repercussions that play out for a long, long time.
Had a great career-focused conversation with someone from an entirely different team this past week. I don’t get to play “mentor” very often, and I hope I did okay with it. Would love to do that more. But a lot of people don’t really seem to think broadly about their careers. Most folks just think about their job.
Here comes the sun… and there it goes?
I’m still set to head out in a week to chase the solar eclipse. Despite it running right through my home state of Ohio, I’m still intending to drive all the way down to Texas, in hopes of more reliable weather.
However, the forecasts—a little more than a week out, so who knows—say my plan might be a mistake. I could end up under clouds in Texas while there’s sun (or lack of sun for 4 minutes) back home. I will be watching this very closely in the days ahead.