Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips What do you do with a person who isn’t doing their job, but seems to do other things? Fire him. He admits he doesn’t know how to do all the things you want him to do. He admits that he just doesn’t learn fast and will take along time to do the […]

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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 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 Want to see knowledge management in action? Go to, of all places, the library. No, we won’t go to the library to find a book all about knowledge management. We will go to the library to see knowledge management in real life. Look about. We are surrounded by reusable modules of knowledge […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It has reached the point where I don’t even ask anymore. Working systems is so much important than documentation, that…well, you know. Situation: Someone has a horrible problem. Someone else has asked them to do something that they simply cannot do. Someone asks me to look at this. Me: Please show me…any […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes people decide simply on what washes in and out with the tide. It works sometimes, but I don’t recommend it. The tide comes in. It carries things, deposits them on the beach, and it goes out. The tide comes in. It picks up what is on the beach, and carries it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Now that the title has infuriated everyone…let’s consider what Agile development does for me the customer. In the previous millennium, customers would decide what they wanted software to do, tell that to a group of persons who wrote software, and come back later at the delivery date. Time marched on, as it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We will change and improve the situation to improve our products and services to better satisfy our customers…as long as… Change for the good is good. Hey, it is great. Notice, I am writing about change that IS going to improve our situation and WILL help us better satisfy our customers. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I recommend an organization for the future or work as we know it. This is the new company. It is an agile team that has worked together on many software projects. The Team has learned much on all these past projects. The Team has become high performing (it “jelled” a long time […]

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