Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips An old saying remains true: the later we find a mistake, the more expensive it is to fix. The later we find a mistake, the more expensive it is to fix. That is an old saying. It is still true. The saying is most-often attributed to Barry Boehm as he described it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We are in a hurry. We still need to do this well. Basketball coach John Wooden, his UCLA teams won 10 national championships, had many sayings. One was, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” Hurry means to move or act with great haste. There is some implication in there about moving or acting […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Chatbots can answer questions about written pieces. They can be good tools for feedback. I was recently testing several different chatbots to understand which performed better. I fed a 200-page document I wrote into each chatbot and asked them questions. There were several questions which all the chatbots failed to answer. The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the good ideas are lurking in the wrong places. Looking for good ideas? Look at bad sources. Read a crummy book. In it I will find, “Now that sentence there is a good idea for a book or something. Why didn’t this person write the book about that instead of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When building systems, reduce the amount of intricate typing required by users. Sometimes we forget this and require too much hand jamming. I ran across the phrase “hand jamming” recently at work. I hadn’t heard that in years. I was happy to hear that some people still knew it and knew what […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Reducing the time spent typing on the keyboards reduces the number of interruptions. There are new tools that reduce both. I can type fairly fast. At least I give myself credit for that. Like everyone else, I am interrupted while typing. I could estimate number of interruptions per hour or some rate […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, the better thing to do is let people do what they think is best or at least what they think is better on any given day. “We are a fill-in-the-blank organization. We use best fill-in-the-blank practices as described by fill-in-the-second-blank who described fill-in-the-blank in the seminal blog post on fill-in-the-blank,” said […]

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By Dwayne Phillips Despite what I have noticed the past couple of years, declaring, “I’m just learning” does not allow us to do whatever we want. Earlier this year, I wrote about using Emergency Flashers to gain allowance to do whatever I want (not). I’ve noticed something similar with stickers on cars that say something […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We predict the future poorly. We know we do. What we don’t seem to realize is how often we predict the future. We predict the future poorly. Very poorly. Very, very poorly. Which among us predicted ChatGPT would arrive? And then become that fastest adopted system ever? I am waiting. Okay, I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is important to remember whose words we are discussing. If you mentioned something, we are discussing your words. If I mentioned something, we are discussing my words. There are ways to back away from our words. I read the words from the PowerPoint. They were wrong. Simply wrong. 1 + 2 […]

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