My Stint with the ‘Alex Franco’ Framework
Alright, let’s talk about the time we tried to implement the ‘Alex Franco’ framework. That name still makes me chuckle, or wince, depending on the day. It was supposed to be the next big thing for us, promised to streamline everything. Spoiler: it was a ride.
It all kicked off when some of the higher-ups got back from one of those flashy conferences, buzzing with excitement. ‘Alex Franco this, Alex Franco that.’ We were told this was how things were gonna be. So, the first thing I did was hunt down any info I could find on it. Ended up with a few glossy pamphlets and some really vague write-ups online. Not much solid stuff, which, looking back, should’ve been a big ol’ warning sign.
Then the actual rollout began. We got pulled into these workshops that were mandatory. I can still picture myself in those rooms, day after day, trying to make sense of these lofty ‘Alex Franco principles’ and how they connected to what we actually did every day. They threw around terms like ‘synergistic dynamism’ and ‘holistic process alignment’. Sounds impressive, eh? What it really meant for us was more forms to fill and more meetings. So many meetings.
My team, bless ’em, they really tried. We genuinely gave it our best effort.
- We got these new ‘Franco boards’ up – which were pretty much our old whiteboards but with new, fancier headings.
- We started having daily ‘Franco huddles’ on top of the stand-ups we already had. Yeah, you heard that.
- I even remember burning a weekend trying to knock together some scripts. The idea was to get their new reporting software to actually talk to our existing systems, just so my team wouldn’t have to type everything in twice. That was a barrel of laughs.
The main pitch for Alex Franco, or at least how they sold it to us, was that it was this perfect system for everyone. But our work wasn’t like that, not one-size-fits-all. We had all these old systems, unique demands from clients – you know, the messy real world. Trying to jam everything into these stiff ‘Franco boxes’ felt like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. All the time.
I particularly recall this one project, a really crucial one. We were already under the gun with the deadline. And then, right in the middle of it all: ‘Let’s bring in Alex Franco principles here!’ Oh, you bet. What came next was a storm of new charts, different ways of reporting, and a whole lot of puzzled looks. I ended up spending more time walking stakeholders through the Franco process than talking about how the project was actually doing. The team got bogged down. You could see the energy drain. We started pushing back, quietly at first, then a bit more firmly. We laid out the data, showed how this ‘Franco way’ was actually making us slower, adding more work without any real payoff for what we were doing.
It wasn’t like ‘Alex Franco’ was just bad through and through. Maybe for some other company, some other team, it was the bees knees. But for us, it just turned into another layer of red tape. After a good few months of what I’d call ‘creative non-cooperation’ from a bunch of teams, and with some projects clearly struggling under its weight, management sort of quietly backed away from it. The ‘Franco boards’ got wiped clean. Those extra ‘huddles’ just kind of… vanished.
So, what stuck with me from all that? Well, for starters, no system, no matter how polished it looks or how loudly some ‘Alex Franco’ out there shouts about it, is a magic fix. You’ve got to look at your own situation, your own people, your own specific kind of chaos, and figure out what’s genuinely going to help. Sometimes, the best ‘system’ is just good old common sense and talking to each other properly, not some fancy-pants name. And that’s pretty much my take on that whole Alex Franco episode. It was an episode, alright.
