Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Someone on the team needs to be a little farther away from the problem than the rest of us. Once upon a time…a team of engineers and such had a major design review in Florida. The team didn’t live in Florida. The head of the team, thoroughly enmeshed in the details of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Which way is your team facing? When? Why? Consider a few options. If we are all facing the same direction…we can’t shake hands, that only happens when we face opposite directions. We can’t see what is sneaking up behind our colleague, again that only happens when we face opposite directions. If we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A review of one of the fundamentals of systems engineering. We create and manage budgets of key technical performance measures. System engineers work with technical budgets. Examples: size weight power attenuation memory use RAM memory use disk time to complete an operation We are building a smartphone. We are told to keep […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Someone who had a big influence on my life has passed away. “The Mote in God’s Eye.” Star Wars was in theaters, and everyone was enthralled. The science fiction community tried to fit in with Luke, Han, and the rest, often in vain. Every science fiction commentator had their own list of, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Jugglers know this. Managers and builders should know this. Let the little things fall without over reacting. Jugglers have to do this. They may be a bit off balance, so they let a ball fall to the ground. An alternative is to over react and reach for that one ball and lose […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Can’t think of anything to write about? Back to freshman English. It was one of the first classes I took in college. I took it the summer after high school graduation. It was a writing class, I guess it was called English Composition or something. We had a great teacher for this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Freedom of choice robs us of excuses. Of course we are free to choose to ignore this. Most of us live in a world of abundance and wealth. Come on folks, admit this is true. We have the freedom to choose much of what we do. It is unfortunate, but we often […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I review an old, and seemingly forgotten, technique for building systems in which we fully describe what a system will be and do. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away… Maybe not that long ago, but still…there was a technique for building systems wherein we wrote the user manual […]

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