Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the cheapest and simplest part of a system is the one that fails and you may have to buy half a dozen of them to find one that works.

I had a bad experience repairing that large appliance in the bathroom. Did you know that you can crawl under a toilet? You can, and it is as bad as it sounds.

After four or five hours of work (I removed the water tank from the toilet bowl, replaced the connecting parts, and attached it again) the problem I was trying to fix still existed. More research on the Internet, that bastion of knowledge known as YouTube, indicated that the problem was with the flapper.

The toilet flapper is that small rubbery-like object that sits atop a large hole. Its function in life is to stop water from flowing out of the tank. It is also the cheapest and simplest part in the system.

What are the odds of having four flappers that don’t seal the hole? The odds are small, but, as they say, greater than zero. Well, I had four flappers that didn’t seal the hole. Water leaked around the seal.

The fifth flapper I had—don’t ask how many trips to Home Depot were required—worked.

Lessons Learned:

Sometimes it is the cheapest and simplest part in the system that breaks.

When you go to the logistics depot, a.k.a., Home Depot in this case, obtain extra parts.

Don’t assume that “brand new” parts work, especially if they only cost $3 at the end of the retail chain (10 cents to make).

Crawl under a toilet at your own peril.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the news has a sharp, pungent taste or smell.

Short and sweet is a fond, old cliche. Gosh, wouldn’t real life be better if most news were short and sweet? Sometimes that is not life; sometimes the news in life is short and bitter.

So, let’s attempt to learn something from bitter news. What does bitter news tell me? Consider a few questions and add more that are relevant to yourself.:

• What does this tell me about myself?
• What does this tell me about my situation?
• What does this tell me about my colleagues?
• What does this tell me about my customers?
• What does this tell me about all the stakeholders?
• What else can I learn from bitter news?
• How can I react in a way that benefits all of us?

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the better choice among two alternatives is neither, nor.

We have two alternatives—this, that. The most well known choice is

either this or that

One of them must be better than the other. Let’s decide which is better and go with it. Aha, but we grow smarter with the years and someone says, let’s take the best of both or let’s take both and make them better, so the choice is

both this and that

I agree that sometimes both-and is better than either-or.

Allow me to add one more legitimate choice:

neither this nor that

Gosh, we hate this one. The result of all our work is this-that. Surely there is merit in this-that. Do you want to discard this-that and continue the search? When will we decide?

Sorry. Sometimes this-that are both bad ideas.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes we operate our meetings and our groups with stupid, unspoken rules.

Silence is agreement

This is one of the things I was told as a much younger person on the job. If I didn’t object loudly in a meeting, I had agreed. Really? Says who? What was that about?

I suppose it was something everything just sort of knew ahead of time. If you didn’t know it, you were too stupid to contribute.

I think this unspoken rule has fallen in use over the years. I am happy to see that. I always felt it was stupid. Everyone was assuming what everyone else thought. It was if everyone was reading the minds of everyone else.

How did anyone ever conclude that?

If I want to know what someone thinks, I as them what they think. Perhaps that is too obvious to write, but there, I wrote it.

by Dwayne Phillips

Knowing, ahead of time, when to change the design of a technology system.

Consider:

We have software running on different computers. We don’t have much electrical power available for computers “out in the field,” i.e., they probably run on batteries. Hence, we move heavy computations to lab computers where electrical power is plentiful. This requires sending a relatively large amount of data from the field to the lab. The computers in the field don’t have much computational power when compared to the lab computers.

Technology Trigger: when a commercially available processor has X computational power at Y or less electrical power, we change how we assign which software to which computer, i.e., we can change the design of the system.

We have a design for today that works with the technology we have today. When technology changes, we change the design. If we are smart, and a bit lucky, we can set an explicit technology trigger so that we only have to monitor one or two things in the technology press.

The concept of the technology trigger is simple. Times change, technology changes, and solutions change with them. Simplicity, however, is not often practiced.

What are the technology realities that drive your designs today? Understand how your design would change if the wished-for technology existed. Watch those technologies as wishes will one day come true.

by Dwayne Phillips

We have yet another case where a manager failed to perform the job title, but someone else was fired.

This is an interesting story. A software tester wrote some software to run all the tests. The tester didn’t have anything to do, so the tester sat around for five years twiddling thumbs.

After five years, a manager discovered what was happening and fired the tester.

Where was the manager when the tester created a money-saving system for running tests? The tester should have been give a big bonus.

Where was the manager when the tester was doing nothing for five years?

Why wasn’t the manager fired?

Come on guys. We all know what should have happened. Let’s do what is right.

by Dwayne Phillips

by Dwayne Phillips

There is often a gap between our history and our story about our history. I suppose, since most of us are not famous, that is okay.

We have experiences—those comprise our history. Then we tell people a story about those experiences. Sometimes the stories enhance the histories.

Barack Obama has some doozies. So did George Bush. So did Bill Clinton, and Brian Williams, and…

Well, those are famous people with famous stories and lots of fact checkers. The trouble that famous people have is that there are a lot of fact checkers out there. These fact checkers might as well be called

history-story gap closers

The rest of us, well, we get away with our stories because it isn’t worth checking on them. I suppose this is another security from obscurity case. I guess that is okay.

Want to get away with lots of history-story gaps? Write fiction that is loosely based your history.

by Dwayne Phillips

This isn’t politics, it is groups of people endeavoring to accomplish something. Give them a gift—policies.

A policy is one of the best gifts upper managers can give to an organization. No, I’m not kidding. We have to understand what a policy is and how we use it.

A policy is a statement that helps everyone decide things everyday.

Here are some example policies:Fewer, better people

Software that we can move to other environmentsDecide nowOnly decide today what we need todayMake the user’s job easier, not your own

Make these short, simple statements. Put them on the walls. When anyone needs to decide anything, they glance at the wall and use the policy to guide them.This isn’t complicated. This works. Try it.

by Dwayne Phillips

I receive yet another certification.

I just passed yet another exam and received yet another certification. Contrary to advertisements, the exam was full of trick questions and didn’t test knowledge of the subject matter. Nevertheless, that is the certification industry, and it is a big $$$ indu$try.

I find it a shame that these types of things don’t seek to provide knowledge and learning and improve professional practice. I suppose I am naive.

Which certification? Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect – Associate level. I did learn much about AWS while preparing for the exam. I didn’t learn anything new about the certification game while taking the exam.