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.
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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.