Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, all that is needed is to explain the other people. This may be the most difficult task in the world. Some people just don’t understand some other people. Why not? Because those are other people who are somewhere else. The two groups of people need someone who lives with one group […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Working software is more valuable than documentation—except when it isn’t. And we have Dwayne’s Declaration. Part of the Agile Manifesto states: We…value working software over comprehensive documentation Some of us are old enough to have known this years before the manifesto was manifest. Of course we wanted working software, except when we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I work in groups of persons; sometimes I work alone. Why don’t I have a workspace for each of these types of work? This is a silly request; I realize that. This request, however, reflects reality and it would certainly improve productivity. I want two work spaces for myself. One is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Government contractors use a new form of the Agile methods. I have met an ever increasing government contractors who claim to use a method they call Agile Lite. This is quite simple. The government official who directs the contractor tells them: (1) Tell everyone that you are doing Agile. (2) Every day, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips O’Reilly creates a large section of “free” books on technology. Once again, they have raised expectations of other publishers. I have long liked O’Reilly publishing. At first, the books with the excellent sketches of animals caught my eye. The content was usually as good or better than the covers. I attended a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization. Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated. I have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Today is election day. Our long national horrible nightmare concludes. Tomorrow we will awaken after a restless sleep and trudge through four years of wondering if we are still asleep and dreaming tortuous dreams. The major party that “loses” this election will have the opportunity to correct itself and occupy the White […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it. I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly […]

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by Dwayne Phillips People on the outside don’t know what people on the inside have discussed. People on the inside, however, tend to assume they do. The situation is common, and defies common sense. A small group of persons meet and discuss an issue. They discuss it for hours, sometimes days, and sometimes weeks. They […]

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