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Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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Entries from February 2015

People-Augmented Applications

February 26th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we remember that we can allow a person to help another person and that we have the technology to enable that. Be My Eyes is a combined application and service that helps sight-impaired people see things clearly. The impaired person points their smartphone at a thing and is […]

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Tags: Communication · Consulting · Ideas · People

Performers, Predictors, and Punishment

February 23rd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips When a performer doesn’t perform as predicted, the predictor is in the wrong. Too bad that we usually fail to recognize that. I write this the week after all the big tech companies posted their quarterly financial reports. Some companies didn’t perform as expected, i.e., as predicted. The result was that the […]

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Tags: Competence · Estimation · Expectations · Judgment

That is for Someone Else

February 18th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Let’s be practical, but let’s still try to attain what we wish. When told that something is “for someone else,” question to motives of the person telling you that. I first encountered this practice when I was in high school. I attended a small, rural high school in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana (Loranger […]

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Tags: Change · Choose · Differences

Us as the User Guide

February 16th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Don’t look to the provider’s user manual; look to the rest of us. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to write about this topic. Almost everyone already knows this, but for the record… I ran into this situation again this week. I was learning how to use a […]

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Tags: Communication · Consulting · Education · Ideas · Internet · Knowledge · Learning

Libel, Slander, and Deflate-Gate

February 12th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips It may come as a surprise to many, but laws against libel and slander still exist. I write this five days before the 2015 Super Bowl. The big topic of conversation in the football world is about under-inflated footballs (yes, western civilization has come to this). What surprises me (at least a […]

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Tags: Communication · Writing

Too Many Words

February 9th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Yet another reason for brevity: the more the words, the more the mistakes. There must be some statistic somewhere that shows the number of mistakes per 1,000 words that writers make (is it a mistake to end a sentence with the word “make?” Did I put my punctuation marks in the right […]

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Tags: Brevity · Clarity · Communication · Writing

We Get One Chance

February 5th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips We each get one chance to share an idea with others. I cannot overemphasize the need to be ready for that chance. I have been working with a colleague for several years now. This colleague has an idea he wants to present to others. He has been talking about the one idea […]

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Tags: Clarity · Communication · People

The Purpose of Most Meetings

February 2nd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Contrary to management theory, meetings are not about (1) information or (2) decision. They are about nice people in a nice setting. I had always been taught that there are two types of meetings: ones in which the group decided something ones in which information was provided to the group Hearing those […]

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Tags: Magic · Management · Meetings