Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Working software is more valuable than documentation—except when it isn’t. And we have Dwayne’s Declaration.

Part of the Agile Manifesto states:

We…value working software over comprehensive documentation

Some of us are old enough to have known this years before the manifesto was manifest. Of course we wanted working software, except when we didn’t.

So here I go, kill me, but

Documentation is more valuable than working software (in some cases).

Valuable documentation…

• is that which comes from thoughtful and rigorous analysis
• explains the situation for which software is assumed to be the solution
• shows when it is better to just do the right thing at work and not waste money on new software

Finally, valuable documentation

• shows us when we don’t need any more software

Please note the first bullet above. Documentation that is more valuable than working software comes about only after thoughtful and rigorous analysis. That type of work is common sense, but not common practice.

Let us Think before we Work.

Hmmm, perhaps that should have been in the Agile Manifesto. Let’s call it Dwayne’s Declaration. Of course it isn’t new. Many of us are old enough to have known this for years.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes I work in groups of persons; sometimes I work alone. Why don’t I have a workspace for each of these types of work?

This is a silly request; I realize that. This request, however, reflects reality and it would certainly improve productivity. I want two work spaces for myself.

One is a large room with big blank walks. The walls would be best if I could write on them and stick magnets to them. This group work space allows for planning. That includes planning tasks for a project or planning the content of a product. Big walls allow for groups of persons to see what others are thinking and contribute to those thoughts.

The second is a room that has one essential item: a door that closes. Sometimes I create content by myself. I am assigned this content in the group work in the first work space. Now, I must work alone and create. Solitude is good for that type of work.

Of course I will never have two work spaces. That is not efficient. That is not affordable. That is not practical. I could go on with the that-is-not list. What that is is that is productive. I guess productive isn’t high on the list of what most organizations desire.

by Dwayne Phillips

Government contractors use a new form of the Agile methods.

I have met an ever increasing government contractors who claim to use a method they call Agile Lite. This is quite simple. The government official who directs the contractor tells them:

(1) Tell everyone that you are doing Agile.

(2) Every day, do what ever I tell you to do that day. And I change my mind often.

Only in government. It would be funny if it weren’t taxpayers’ money being wasted.

by Dwayne Phillips

O’Reilly creates a large section of “free” books on technology. Once again, they have raised expectations of other publishers.

I have long liked O’Reilly publishing. At first, the books with the excellent sketches of animals caught my eye. The content was usually as good or better than the covers. I attended a few conferences the O’Reilly held. They spoiled me as to how good conference presentations and presenters could be.

O’Reilly has recently put many books online for reading at no charge. Here is a link to the programming section of free books. At the bottom of the page, there are links to free books on other topics.

This is excellent. I applaud O’Reilly. As a writer, I cringe a bit because the writers are not being paid, at least I don’t know how they could be paid when the publishers gives away the books. Well, they don’t give away the paper books, but allow us to read them without charge.

This is excellent. I applaud O’Reilly. I know several would-be college students who have no money and don’t want to be in debt to the taxpayers for the rest of their lives.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization.

Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated.

I have tried to do knowledge management since the early 1980s (no one called it knowledge management back then). The great majority of knowledge management efforts fail. In my experience, the reason is simple:

job insecurity

What I know, what I know how to do, those things make me valuable to this organization. If my knowledge is stored and available for other people to use, what use am I? I am expendable.

Silly thought? Maybe, but people believe this thought and act accordingly. They don’t participate in the knowledge management efforts. They would rather repeat knowledge-seeking exercises that costs tens of hours of time. They are paid to be at work, so they are paid.

Why work yourself out of a job?

Want a knowledge management program? Find a way to ease the job security fears. That isn’t easy, but I find it is worth it.

by Dwayne Phillips

Today is election day. Our long national horrible nightmare concludes. Tomorrow we will awaken after a restless sleep and trudge through four years of wondering if we are still asleep and dreaming tortuous dreams.

The major party that “loses” this election will have the opportunity to correct itself and occupy the White House for 12 or 16 years thereafter.

by Dwayne Phillips

I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it.

I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly often. Pull it out of the rack, open the top, find the bad component, replace it, put it back in the rack.

This was a time consuming process. You saw a symptom, you read the maintenance manual, you looked at this, you looked at that, AHA! Here is the trouble. Fix and move on.

Being young, naive, and trying to help our Federal government save money…I had a brilliant idea. Let’s keep records of all this. My first knowledge management project was born. We got a few stacks of 5″x7″ cards and a wooden box to hold them. Each card corresponded to a piece of equipment. If the equipment failed, we pulled the card, wrote the symptoms, the key page of the maintenance manual, and the fix. We had a record of maintenance on each piece of equipment and how to fix that equipment.

Save time. Save money. Good stuff.

The fundamental premise was that the knowledge gained in any one equipment repair cost the government money to obtain. Let’s save what we could of that knowledge so that we wouldn’t spend the money again on the same work.

We implemented the system. I used it. Few other engineers used it. Why not? Read the next post on job insecurity.

by Dwayne Phillips

People on the outside don’t know what people on the inside have discussed. People on the inside, however, tend to assume they do.

The situation is common, and defies common sense. A small group of persons meet and discuss an issue. They discuss it for hours, sometimes days, and sometimes weeks. They discuss it so much they know what the next person is going to say before they say it. They discuss it so much they develop inside jokes.

No one outside the group knows has any insight into the discussions. They’ve never heard the inside jokes.

The inner circle finally meets with everyone else and gives a presentation of what is coming next in the organization. The inner circle assumes the outer circle knows everything the inner circle knows. The issue has been discussed to death; surely everyone knows that and knows the discussion.

The inner circle members quip inside jokes and laugh hysterically. The outer circle members look at each other silently and shrug with embarrassment.

All subsequent efforts at addressing the issue flop miserably. The inner circle wonders why the outer circle is so dense and worthless. Maybe next time the outer circle won’t be so clueless.

Some Lessons:

• If you are on an inner circle and have discussed a topic to death, that is your problem. No one made you discuss a topic until you were sick of it. You did it to yourselves.
• No one outside the inner circle knows anything about your discussions.
• If you want the outer circle to know the inner circle discussions, you have to repeat them in full to the outer circle.
• Sorry. There are no mind readers.
• Sorry. The outer circle does not have blind trust in the genius of the inner circle.
• Life can be tough sometimes. Deal with it.

If you work with other persons, and I am pretty sure the vast majority of us do, you need to spend the time and effort to explain yourself. Once again, sorry, but that is life.

by Dwayne Phillips

These are my most recent and most favored proposal-writing tools.

In the past few years I have spent some of my time writing proposals for companies seeking government contracts. There are a lot tools available to proposal writers and all other types of writers.

Here are my most favored and most productive tools:

• blank sheet of paper
• sharp pencil
• table at Popeye’s Fried Chicken
• (large serving of red beans and rice—optional)

Not very high-tech, huh?

Effective? Yes.

Expensive? No.

Hard to sell this to proposal managers? Yes.

Why does this work? Most office environments are productivity and creativity attenuators, and I like Popeye’s red beans and rice. I also like the feel of pencil lead dragging across paper.

by Dwayne Phillips

The heartlessness of the common job advertisement. If you issue such ads, please consider your audience—the unemployed.

Join us!

…reads the job listing title. The listing continues with…

As we create wonderful wonderfulness in a wonderful workplace!

GREAT! When do you want me to arrive? When do I receive my first paycheck? Oh, what? You aren’t offering me a job? Then what are you telling me?

Oh, I get it. As I consider the two dozen job offers in my pocket, I should remember that yours is the top workplace in the market. Oh, sure, great.

But wait. I don’t have two dozen job offers in my pocket. The economy is a shambles. The economic recovery doesn’t exist. My experience is irrelevant. Touting the wonderfulness of your workplace sounds heartless.