I am unhappy about this fact. Summer is awful: a stark, staring presence that overhangs everything, that intrudes at my window and turns gentle shadow to sharp line.

It shortens my temper and ruins my focus. It is focussed by the places I love, turning a city of glass and steel into a maze of scorching, blazing beams. It turns what I love into something I can’t stand.

Anyway, the sun has got his hat on. Bastard.

So how’s the week been…aside from that? Not bad. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and put all of my work into a kanban¹. There’s about as much as I expected, but I noticed over the week how much comes in that’s unplanned and urgent. Dealing with unplanned work requires slack in the system – if there’s not enough slack, then the work has to become planned, which unplanned and urgent work never can be.

Slack requires that I purposefully under-plan what work the team will do, safe in the knowledge that stuff will come in from the left field. I can also track how long these things take, and get a rough sense of how much I can underplan. This is going to be a hard sell, so I want to make absolutely sure I’ve got the data to back it up.

Or to prove me wrong. That’s good too!

Within the work, I’ve got four or five different strands happening, but it seems to just be work as opposed to work-towards. Activity, but not progress. This is probably a sign for me to carve out an hour next week and get to the bottom of where things aren’t aligned and why not. Again and again, this new role mostly seems to be repeating the same message again and again, or passing messages up and down a chain and then meta-messages to check understanding.

Because I’m an engineer I start thinking in models and APIs. What are the handoffs? What messages are being sent, and what happens to them when they get consumed? We’re working on a ‘front door’ process, and I’m intrigued to see what falls out of it. Having a single collection for requests means we can analyse them, which should start identifying user needs that we’re not meeting. It’ll hopefully also lead to some standardised playbooks or updated advice – stuff that’s just commodity information that can be consumed by everyone.

Anyway. One person off next week, which might mean less work or more work. I’ll report back.

1. kanban means board, and ‘kanban board’ is as redundant as ‘naan bread’ and ‘chai tea’. If you’re going to steal a word from another language, learn what it means, lest you end up with Pendleton Hill ↩︎