Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Take care when choosing an example for teaching. Often what seem to be great examples are terrible in that people concentrate on the unintended.

I have taken a lot of courses related to project management. I have taught a few. I have read a lot of books on project management, and, as well, I have written a few.

Teachers love to teach through examples. There are many examples of failed projects stemming from mistakes of the project managers. A few examples that I saw many times in courses include:

• Re-building the FAA traffic control system
• The C-17 Cargo Plane
• The Denver airport baggage handling system

Dated? Yes. These are old and many people won’t remember them. Hence, we need knew examples. Ah, government to the rescue with Health Care dot Gov. What a great example.

Ah, but Health Care dot Gov is a terrible example to use in a book or class.

Health Care, at least for now in the U.S., is a political issue. There are deep political and emotional divides about this. Using the web site project as a lesson in what to do wrong in project management will more than likely lead to political arguments. Students won’t learn about technology and technique as their emotions will clog their ears and preoccupy their minds.

Here is an example of a bad example for teaching.  I once attended a class where the topic of an exercise was, well, I can’t remember the topic of the exercise. What I remember is that the teacher created an example that was near and dear to the hearts of the students. It was so near and dear that three hours after class dinner the students were still arguing about the specifics of the situation at dinner. The lesson was something about taking notes or reading different sources of information or something, but no one saw that. The nearness and dearness filled the students with emotion.

Hence, the teacher and writer have a challenge. Find something familiar and pertinent as an example, but not too familiar and pertinent. This is not for the faint of heart.

by Dwayne Phillips

A veto is where one person can say NO, and that over rules a multitude of YESs. Look around and notice the prevalence of the veto.

I was in a fast food restaurant early on a recent Saturday morning (old people like me tend to do those things). Three teens were sitting in a booth listening to music on a computer and singing along with the songs. They were a bit noisy.

The restaurant manager asked people like me if the teens were bothersome. I shrugged an “okay.” Each person in the place agreed that while a bother, there was no need to boot the teens.

This, however, was a classic veto situation. If one customer said, “Please tell the kids to be quiet,” the manager would have done so no matter how many customers said, “they are kids and they are not acting up, so let them be.”

A veto is where one person can say NO. That single NO overrules a multitude of YESs.

The veto exists in government. Well, of course, the President has authority to veto acts of Congress. I am not writing about that veto. There is another veto alive and well in government buried down in the bureaucracy.

Almost any one at any level at any salary can veto decisions made at the highest level.

Don’t believe it? I have seen it – many times. One person takes a paper that requires a simple initial to pass on, puts that piece of paper in the bottom of the In Box, and leaves it there. This occurs in even in those enlightened government bureaucracies that use electronic vice paper routing. The veto-er simply ignores an item he doesn’t like.

These veto-ers can be found and coerced into voting YES with everyone else. That, however, takes effort from people higher in the organization. Those higher-ups, are busy doing things that higher-ups do to fill their days. They assume that once they made a big decision, everyone below them will execute all the little tasks to implement the decision. Silly notion.

Vetoes exist in non-government organizations as well. Ever see a baggage handler at an airport handle some bags carefully while tossing others wildly? That handlers is exercising the inherent veto power of the job.

by Dwayne Phillips

All magazines are thinner than they used to be – not so. Somehow, the IEEE keeps its magazines thick.

I have been an IEEE Computer Society member for 30 years (yes, I am that old). Computer is the lead publication of that group.

The monthly magazine is still 136 pages long. That is now the thickest magazine I see, and I see a lot of magazines. I guess there are explanations for this.

by Dwayne Phillips

To understand a non-sensical decision, consider the age of the person deciding.

It was the early 1990s (yes, I am that old), we were using Cray and other supercomputers (government program, so we had several), and we were interviewing your programmers. They all gasped to learn that we were programming in FORTRAN (not Java or C++ or some other such thing). The reason was simple. Cray sold supercomputers to people who were in their 40s and 50s. Those people programmed in FORTRAN back when they programmed.

The age of the people deciding things explains much about their decisions. For several decades, I worked for the government in various locations in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. I never understood the locations of the buildings we used, until I realized who decided the locations. The buildings were too far “in” for people my age. The buildings, however, were in the neighborhoods of the people who decided the locations. They were 20 or 30 years older. When they were the house-buying age, they bought in what were at the time the “outer” suburbs. They picked office buildings close to their homes, but these buildings were “inner” compared to the younger employees.

Congress often makes what seem to be non-sensical decisions. Consider the age of the members of Congress. The decisions start to make sense.

Why do these people decide on things that are decades too old? Because they are several decades older. If you want to influence those “deciders,” talk to them about the people affected by their decisions. They usually forget about the younger people.

by Dwayne Phillips

Government agencies often build systems with considering other government agencies, not taxpayers, as the customer.

I hate to keep writing about healthcare.gov, but the lessons are so obvious. I have to wonder who is in charge and what they are thinking.

It was the early 1990s, and the management fad of the day was Total Quality Management – TQM. A big part of TQM was satisfying your customer. So, we asked, “who is my customer?”

The answer was simple, “My boss is my customer. If I satisfy my boss, I am rewarded.”

The taxpayer? That person who pays the money for the government to operate? They were too far removed from my world to be considered my customer.

Consider HealthCare.gov – the epitome of a government project that attempts to serve its customer.

The citizen taxpayer as customer: The citizen wants quick information. How much coverage do the different plans provide? How much do the different plans cost? Do I qualify for tax credits to help pay for my coverage? How much is my credit? When must coverage begin? What is the penalty for not having insurance?

Government agencies as customer: The agencies want the citizens’ information: address, name, identifiers, income, family size.

Now look at the site. What happens first? It is clear that the primary customers are government agencies. The citizen taxpayers are secondary.

Serving the public? People first? Not.

by Dwayne Phillips

Don’t try big government programs. The government doesn’t have the expertise.

There have been lots of problems with the new government health care site. What surprises me is that some people are surprised. How can you not build a web site that registers users and takes orders? Amazon and just about everyone in the world has already done this. This is not new technology.

Well,

this is a government program, and government programs have difficulty doing what everyone else in the world has already done.

This little statement crushes many people who are inexperienced in government, a.k.a., our current President. Throw out all the theory and all the commercial practice. Government is years and sometimes decades behind current practice in most fields. This is particularly true in information technology. I won’t tell horror stories as I will leave that up to other current and former government employees.

This is one reason why I cannot be in favor of big, new government programs is the government does not have the expertise to execute them. See, for example, my little blog post on spending a billion dollars.

The answer is small government programs that build over time. Time allows for expertise to grow in the government offices. This requires time and patience: two more items the government lacks.

by Dwayne Phillips

Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades.

I don’t usually write about current events in this blog, but the front page of the Washington Post was too much to resist. The Health Care dot Gov web site has been a fiasco, but the news is worse:

the Administration is bringing in experts to fix the problems

This is terrible news.

First, adding people to a late project only makes it later. These “experts” will have to come up to speed on what has been done and why. That means the people working on the site have to stop working and start explaining. The delays multiply.

Second, and worse than the first, we know this. We have known for decades that adding people to a late software project makes it later. How has this little gem of knowledge borne of pain escaped the current group of people in charge?

by Dwayne Phillips

There is a wrong way and a right way to place a door to a public restroom. Why is this so difficult?

This is a bit of an odd blog post, but here goes.

I am fed up with poor public restroom architecture. There is a right and wrong way for the door to the restroom to open. The door should not open to give a view of the toilet. (see figure – click to enlarge)

The Wrong Way and Right Way to Position the Door for a Public Restroom

Why do restroom designers make this mistake so often. It isn’t that difficult.

by Dwayne Phillips

I learn a few things about learning environments.

I recently attended a conference on innovation in education at George Mason University. I am not a professional educator and, to be candid, I never thought much about professional educators.

To show that I am not all cold hearted and stone headed, I learned a few things about Personal Learning Environments. These are basically web tools that allow a person to make their own Internet or their own portal to the Internet.

• Reclaim Hosting gives a student a web site with blog and just about everything else they could want for $12 a year – that is inexpensive.
• Symbaloo allows you to create a button interface to the Internet sites you like to use all the time.

I see great value in both these tools. Try them for yourself.

by Dwayne Phillips

What is a typographical error?

Writing anything incorrectly when you know what is correct.

For example:

He nows how to type.

Their going to school.

I type as fast as I can when drafting. I make lots of typographical errors, and I don’t catch them all when editing.