The deadline nobody schedules
A change in administration is the one deadline in state government that arrives regardless of whether anyone prepared for it. Institutional knowledge walks out in January, and what it leaves behind is whatever somebody thought to write down.
Most of what an office knows is undocumented by default. Not secret — just never written, because the people who know it are busy using it. Which vendor to call. Why that approval step exists. What the newsletter’s real lead time is, as opposed to the one on the calendar.
What it is
A thirty-eight-page operational guide covering how the communications office actually runs, paired with five role-specific worksheets so each position hands off its own knowledge rather than trusting a single author to have thought of everything.
The worksheets matter more than the page count. A guide written by one person captures one person’s model of the office. Five worksheets capture five, including the parts the author did not know were load-bearing.
The test
The document is written for a reader who has no context, no relationship with anyone still in the building, and no way to ask a follow-up question. If it only makes sense to someone who was already here, it has failed at the one job it has.
What happened: TODO — how it gets used, or what leadership did with it.
More work on this page, and more about me over here.