Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I try hard at everything. Sometimes I try hard too much. <start advice> Slow down. Back away. Breathe. Drink a cup of coffee. Relax. Take a nap. Find your own little zen thing that helps you to not try so hard. <end advice>

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by Dwayne Phillips Before doing anything else—think. Yes, this is old advice, but it still works. Process, process, process. The world uses Agile processes now. (At least those people whose job it is to tell everyone else what their organization does tells the world that they are Agile. I tend to doubt that they actually […]

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by Dwayne Phillips People often choose a development method without any reason other than, “that is what everyone is doing now.” I urge a bit more thought. More thought on day one brings more time and energy the rest of the way. Agile development is all the rage today. I know because I am unemployed […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are practices that time has proven to be worthwhile. Someone in school drilled them into us. We vowed to avoid them as soon as school was out, but life eventually catches us. I have lost track of the number of times I have seen this on the job. We have a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems that everyone is using an Agile process these days. There really isn’t anything new in Agile. And, in some cases, Agile can slow the delivery of software to users. What? Agile be slow? Yes, Agile processes can slow the delivery of software to users. Twenty years ago, I worked in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is the thing we are attempting and the way we are attempting it. Using this perspective, there are four cases to consider. Wrong Thing – Wrong Way: Here we chose the wrong problem to solve and the wrong process to solve it. Aargh. We will work very hard with grievous vexation […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Contemplative writing is a valuable practice. It is far more valuable and far less used than shallow meetings. In my 28 years working for the government, I attended countless meetings where much of nothing was discussed. I avoided far more if these meetings than I attended. Meetings are a characteristic of government […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technical projects have plenty of opportunities to misunderstand what someone else is doing. Help yourself. If something is different, give it a different name. This is a post about a part of configuration management. But don’t stop reading yet. This makes sense and is not painful. Things change in technical projects. Software […]

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by Dwayne Phillips How to cross the barrier of the blank sheet of paper. I love a blank sheet of paper. I know a lot of people who don’t. I was in a meeting once where people were given blank sheets of paper and literally revolted. They wanted some type of template to focus their […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I learned a problem-solving method when I was a sophomore in college (in the previous millenium). It still works. I have a problem today at work. I have no idea what to do. Let’s fall back in time to my second year of calculus in college. The professor told us something like: […]

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