Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips When do you find time to write? Wrong question, at least the wrong question for me. This past week I was sharing something I was writing with another person. This person told me about how they have wanted for years to write something on a similar topic, but just couldn’t find the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often have the choice of learning now or later. Often we don’t have the time to learn now, so we put it off until it really hurts. Gosh, we are in a hurry so much of the time. We just can’t pause to think, reflect, and learn at this moment. Some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes you just lower your head against a wall and push as hard as you can. Let’s begin this little blog post by noting that I attended LSU—not MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford or any of those places known for producing really smart people. At LSU, we may not be able to spell […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a question we should constantly ask. Try the simplest thing to be, to do, to have. Several years ago, I posed a question to participants at a conference session I was facilitating. The design problem was about storing information from a business. I wanted a design of a system that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is a tried and true method of gathering requirements and specifying systems. Imagine you had a thousand assistants. There are various methods of gathering requirements and specifying systems. A basic one is to imagine a thousands assistants awaiting your request. If you had a thousand assistants, what would you have them […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Given histories on the Internet, the good news is that I can find the correct date and event. The bad news is, I no longer have the excuse that, “Maybe I didn’t remember correctly.” That is just lazy. I am making notes of my life for my children and grandchildren. The sort […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some advice on kids’ sports. This is really good advice. As usual, someone else gave it to me. Major league baseball is concluding yet another season. The Little League baseball national and international tournaments just concluded (putting all those kids’ games on national TV live was a horrible mistake). What’s one to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, the one thing needed for a person to do something new and frightening is simply permission. Here is how to write a book: Simple? Yes. Works? Absolutely, I have done this about a dozen times. You start. When you reach the end, you stop. But what about…? Yes, we can ask […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We can have too many people in the room to discuss something. We can also become locked in an inner circle where no one else understands what we are doing. There should be a balance. There are too many people in the room: Twenty people (pick a number) is too many. There […]

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