Working Up

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

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Entries from September 2016

Vin Scully, Neighbor

September 29th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I won’t hear my old neighbor’s voice anymore. Vin Scully retires. It was 40-something years ago. I was a kid playing in the back yard in southern California. I played to the music of Vin Scully describing Dodger baseball games. I never saw our neighbor—Mr. Garcia. He had erected some sort of […]

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Tags: Communication

Cloud-Based Development and Risk

September 26th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips What could possibly go wrong with moving all your development to the cloud? At least ask the question. Programmers are running to cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs). Once again, consumers run away from bad services, in this case the IT department, and towards better services, in this case cloud providers. This comes […]

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Tags: Programming · Risk

They Want You to Fail

September 22nd, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes people give you a task they know you will fail. That is because they want you to fail. Sometimes we are all dysfunctional. In government and business and everything else, sometimes, some persons give tasks to other persons while wanting them to fail. The giver of the impossible task puts the […]

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Tags: Communication · Customer · Failure · Fear

A Numbers Game

September 19th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This is simple. Have more people working with you, and success is much more likely to come your way. This one cannot be overstated. Linus Torvalds is famous for stating it, but many others have also stated it many times over many years. Anything that increases the number of people working a […]

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Tags: Communication · Culture · Freelance · Group

The Free Solution

September 15th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Designers design solutions. The most despised solution a designer can design is often the one that is free. Designers design solutions to problems. In today’s employment vocabulary, designers are called Solutions Architects. (I find that title an insult to architects and the English language, but that is just me. Anyways…) For this […]

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Tags: Competence · Design · Uncategorized

Not a Good Fit – Part 2

September 12th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The second major explanation of what “not a good fit” means. Now for the second explanation (the first was in the immediately preceding post). This explanation is a bit more complex. Basically, it is the interviewing organization is mismanaged, a.k.a., they don’t know what they are doing. The interviewing organization is overworked. […]

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Tags: Competence · Culture · Integrity · Management

Not a Good Fit – Part 1

September 8th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The first explanation of what “not a good fit means.” I apply for a job. I interview face-t0-face with a team of persons. Several days later I receive the form email stating, “sorry, you are not a good fit.” What does that mean? I have two main explanations. This post will give […]

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Tags: Culture · Employment

Expanding the AI Problem Set

September 5th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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Tags: Adapting · General Systems Thinking · Learning · Problems · Process

A Big Step to Higher Quality

September 1st, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips There is a simple step that will push you and yours to produce better goods and services. Want higher quality? Want people to delight in your products? Want to accomplish these and other quality improvement goals without spending any money? Yes, yes, and Y E S! Here it is: Put you name […]

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Tags: Competence · Integrity · Management