You can Make your own Work

Did you know you can make your own job?

And I don't just mean starting your own business - though that will be part of it for some.

I also mean

• taking the job you have and making it yours, making it work really well
• doing whatever you can to make the work feel good, to make the work feel essential to your identity and wellbeing
• solving the problems that sit at your feet, that are under your nose and under your control

Here are some things I learned by doing the opposite.

A story about 2nd-order work - or 'working on work'

I was thinking back to when I worked in a municipality. Inspections of assets were recorded in paper workbooks (think parks and playground safety, equipment inventories, service performance, etc.) Everyone - all-staff - was generally stretched beyond their elastic potential, so our primary goal was to keep the infrastructure operating safely - period.

Inspections were essential, but recording those inspections wasn't a priority. First came ensuring their safe operations. With time always running out, there was little left for budgeting, parks events, preventative maintenance, community experience, strategic improvements, provincial grants, litigation, economic development initiatives, etc.

But an inspection is about more than maintaining equipment and keeping people safe. An inspection is observation, it's sensing, and it allows you to:

• question your hypotheses: "is there enough mulch under the swings?", "how are those new chains holding up?"
• build your datasets: "what's the remaining useful life?", "how many, how soon, how much?"
• make informed decisions: "how does the community use the park", "what are our strategic priorities for 2023?"

At the time, my understanding of the inspection's deeper purpose was limited, and so was my capacity to seek improvements.

I didn't think to FIX our work; I didn't think of the potential improvements

In hindsight, I wish we'd built a more robust inspections program to address these considerations. We could have been:

• recording and collaborating on inspections
• escalating issues to people as work orders
• triaging and responding to customer input and complaints
• building development plans and strategies
• identifying and managing grants and procurements

and all from within the same system, with all components talking to each other, with us and our systems learning together. The whole process could have been custom built to meet the specific needs of our workers, customers, and organization.

Instead, our papers and ledgers couldn't feed the cycle of improvement. Our improvements couldn't keep pace with the changes in our operating environment. We were always behind and we always stressed about it.

And so we separated service delivery from service improvement (change), and we committed ourselves to the former.

We didn't even really know there was another way. Some things we didn't even see as problems, meaning there was no way we would have searched for a solution. We didn't know we could make the work our own.

So I built an Inspection's app

So a few weeks back, I was thinking on this experience, thinking of municipalities, thinking of micro-solutions, and I built Inspector's Gadget, a cloud-based inspections app.

It's not perfect, but it's a perfect phase-1 MVP and it would have met my needs with my former municipality.

The app took about two weeks to build in Coda.io and was more fun than it should have been. It's open-source within the Coda platform, meaning anyone can customize it further to suit their org.

And even a more complete custom solution is inexpensive to have made, at around ~$5-10k with annual costs of $200-500 for the Coda subscription.

(If you came here with a passion for inspections, you can play with the Inspector's Gadget app on Coda)

All that said, there are improvements to be made that use only your time.

How can you fix your work? (perform inspections!)

If you're not ready to design and build a solution, start performing inspections on your work.

Here are some good places to take a look at when you want to make your work better.

1. notice frictions

Start documenting issues and reflections. Ask yourself:

• where does the work not feel right?
• where are people getting stuck?
• where does our work break down?
• which decisions are taking the longest?
• where are we lacking supporting information and/or practices?
• why is all this happening? WHY?!

2. talk to people

Find out how these things impact the other people in the process. Ask them:

• (the questions above)
• how do our handoffs feel to you?
• what's your understanding or perspective on this thing/situation?
• how would you change it?

3. change something small that's within your control

Choose a mini issue and design its mini solution. Then implement it:

• add a calendar reminder to your email to think about a project
• discuss the best use of a meeting
• remove a duplicate approver
• make a plan for the next cycle

That's all, thanks for reading! If you've got a minute, I'd love to understand some of your best techniques for making better work - add them to the comments below!

Happy working!

Andy

‍