Designing government offices for a post-COVID era
Project Overview
As a Senior Program Manager at Travis County, I was brought to restart and rethink a countywide space planning initiative that had stalled for nearly two years. The objective was to create a consistent, fair, and adaptable approach to managing office space that reflected how the workforce had changed post-COVID.
COVID fundamentally changed how the county operated. Departments functioned independently and had the autonomy to decide where and how their employees worked. Some teams were fully in-office, others remote, and many hybrid.
This flexibility led to widespread misalignment between how space was allocated and how it was actually used. Many buildings were underutilized or no longer supported modern ways of working.
Prior to my involvement, a consulting firm had delivered a set of space standards. While thoughtful, the recommendations didn’t fully capture the county’s culture or the practical realities of different departments. Leaders viewed the standards as too rigid, which led to resistance and stalled implementation.
My role
Coming into the project after the original effort lost momentum allowed me to approach the work with fresh eyes to question assumptions, identify gaps, and rethink how the framework could better serve the organization.
I owned program leadership end-to-end, from re-establishing momentum to designing the operating model that would sustain the work long-term.
Approach
I restarted the initiative by bringing structure, clarity, and collaboration back into the process. I built a clear project plan and timeline to re-establish momentum, convened cross-functional partners across departments, engaged leadership and staff to understand real-world space needs and concerns, and balanced strategic standards with flexibility for departmental differences
Rather than treating the standards as a one-time deliverable, I focused on designing a system that could evolve as needs changed.
Solution
I refined the space standards to be more practical and adaptable, ensuring they reflected how teams actually worked. I designed a clear, repeatable process for departments to request and receive space approvals, established a governance structure that clarified decision-making, accountability, and escalation paths, and defined who was involved at each stage and how tradeoffs and exceptions were evaluated.