Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

“You get what you inspect, not what you expect” (source forgotten, lesson relearned painfully too often)

Relearning can be painful. At least “learning” is in there somewhere, and I believe that learning is a fruitful use of time.

Here’s a recent conversation:

Manager: I can’t believe how bad the quality of work done by the people who work for me.

Me: You sound disappointed.

Manager: Yeah, I expected much better from them.

Me: You told them what you expected as for as quality is concerned.

Manager: Of course I did. Why I…

Me: Did their early work meet your expectations?

Manager: No! I told you how bad their work is.

Me: What was their reaction to your early discussions about the difference between your expectations and their work?

Manager: Uh, what do you mean?

Me:  Well, you said their early work didn’t meet your expectations.

Manager: Well, uh, yeah, I mean look at it.

Me: When did you know that their early work didn’t meeting you expectations?

Manager: When I looked at their work.

Me: When was that.

Manager: Yesterday

Me: When did they start producing work?

Manager: Six months ago.

Me: So, you didn’t inspect or look at any of their work for six months.

Manager: Look, these are adults. I shouldn’t have to look over their shoulder to make sure they are doing their job. I mean I do my job for my pay. They should do their job for their pay. Like I said, they are adults.

Me: Were you sure you were doing their job? It doesn’t seem that you were managing the work.

Manager: You just don’t understand.

Me: I agree.

There are many possible reasons for not meeting expectations. Some are:

• The people didn’t know the expectations (expectations not expressed)
• The people heard the expectations, but misunderstood them (expectations expressed poorly)
• The people disagreed with the expectations (expectations incorrect in the opinion of some)
• The people ignored the expectations (expectations owned by someone whom no one respected)

We could go on.

Perhaps the world would be wonderful if everyone met my expectations, i.e., if everyone worked like an adult and didn’t need me looking at their work. Perhaps not. Regardless, I get what I inspect, i.e., what I examine, what I discuss with people, what I care enough about to spend my time. Without that effort on my part, I rarely get what I expect.

And I really wish I could remember the source of “you get what you inspect, not what you expect.” Reminders from readers are appreciated.

by Dwayne Phillips

The later in a project you correct a mistake, the more it costs. Confirmed again.

There are many wise sayings associated with managing and working  projects. Many of the wise sayings are myths that have been busted. Many, however, are true, and we stubbornly refuse to believe them. Our stubbornness is evidenced by repeatedly ignoring them and hurting ourselves. One of these old wise saying that is true is:

The later in a project you correct a mistake, the more it costs.

A current project I work has a lot of MS Word documents. Word documents are fine alone. When you try to combine them into one document, you can have all sorts of problems with paragraph styles, Tables of Contents, and such. The persons on the project didn’t address these concepts early as they would be taken care of later. Well, later is here, and yes, there will be dozens of person hours spent correcting mistakes that were made early in the project. Too bad they weren’t corrected early in the project when the fixes were simple.

Wise old saying confirmed (again).

by Dwayne Phillips

I observe that some people will transfer the power over their lives to people whom they disdain.

I find this odd, but I find it often. Some people will give other people power over their lives. The conversation goes something like this:

Person A: “That person is ruining my life!”

Me: “How is that?”

Person A: “Why, they said a bad thing about me!”

Me: “And how does that ruin your life?”

Person A: “Why, why, why, well what do you mean? Don’t you understand how that makes me feel?”

Me: “So that person controls how you feel?”

Person A: “Of course!”

Me: “When did you give them that power?”

Person A: “Why, you just don’t understand.”

Me: “I agree with you on that point.”

What I find more odd to the odd is that Person A will give this power to someone whom they disdain. The above conversation will start with:

Person A: “That little so-and-so is ruining my life!”

The remainder of the conversation proceeds as above.

Take the first statement and replace “so-and-so” with your favorite deragatory term for a small, powerless being. Some of the words I have heard include twerp, twit, skunk, idiot, and a number of nouns I will not repeat here.

The point is that Person A is giving a powerless being to power over their life. Again, I find that odd, but I find that often.

by Dwayne Phillips

There is no substitute for knowing what you are doing.

I love working with people who know what they are doing. They come to the workplace, see challenges in front of them, and eagerly plow into the work.

Short pause – I don’t live in LaLaLand. I live and work in the real world. Some of the above-described people actually exist and work in the real world. It is a pleasure to work with them.

One more thing: sometimes, “knowing what you are doing” means “you know how to learn how to do things that you don’t know how to do.”

That is the best “knowing what you are doing” knowledge: knowing how to behave in the face of the unknown. It is the attitude of, “Look, something unknown! Learning will be such great fun!”

by Dwayne Phillips

I find there are three characteristics I want to see in the people who work with me.

There are three things I want to see in the people who work with me:

1. They know what they are doing
2. They have the self-discipline to do it
3. They have the courage to tell the truth (often when others don’t want to hear it)

1. They know what they are doing – I don’t have to tell them how to do their jobs. More on this one in a later blog post.

2. They have the self discipline to do it. I don’t have to look over their shoulder or write procedures or make checklists or have a QA person. I may do some or all of those things, but I don’t have to do them. The ideal co-workers do their jobs they way they know how to do them.

3. They have the courage to tell the truth (often when others don’t want to hear it). I have met many people at work who don’t want to hear the truth. They want to hear that everything is fine, everything is going according to plan, all is well, no reason to think. I would love to hear those things as well, but only if they are true.  Regardless of what it does to my “to do list” for the day, I want to hear the truth. I am an adult; I work with adults.

Adults can work with the truth.

Children pretend other things.

So much for adults and children for the day. I like to work with adults. I love to play with (grand)children at home.

by Dwayne Phillips

If a system fails at one boundary, it will probably fail at another boundary. Hence, if you find a boundary failure, start looking for other boundary failures while you still have a chance at prevention instead of correction.

A few years back I had a problem with my van. I couldn’t reliably turn on the headlights. That was a bad situation, especially after dark. I found myself sitting in a parking lot flipping the headlight switch over and over until the lights finally illuminated.

Then one night, I found that I couldn’t turn the headlights off. Again, that was a bad situation as leaving the headlights on all night would drain the battery and so on. Then it hit me:

boundary condition failures

The headlight switch failed at one boundary – turn lights on – then it failed at another boundary – turn lights off. My headlight switch was a classic example of a system that worked well in a “sweet spot” or “sweet range” of conditions, but had difficulties at the boundaries or edges.

Now consider a recent project I worked. Some weeks we had nothing to do – extremely light work. That was a boundary condition failure in planning the work for the project. Think about the other boundary condition. Well, I didn’t have to think about it much as the next week we had 80 hours worth of work. That was another boundary condition failure in planning the work for the project.

Hmm, a headlight switch and planning the work for a project. These two things had nothing in common except for boundary condition failures.

Time, and more keystrokes, would allow me to relate more examples of boundary condition failures. A lesson to draw from these examples is:

If your system has a boundary condition failure, start searching around the boundaries for other failures

Boundary condition failures bring more pain than other kinds of failures – at least they have in my life. This is because the boundary conditions don’t happen often, but usually happen at critical points in time – like when you are sitting in a dark parking lot and you can’t turn on the headlights.

by Dwayne Phillips

Change in people (and what other type of change is interesting enough to consider?) takes time. Plan for it.

Change takes time as people just don’t change quickly. Sometimes in an emergency we change quickly, but who wants to face an emergency?

Here is a true story.

I was working on the east coast and had an association with a company on the west coast – let’s call them WestCo. WestCo wasn’t doing well with their software development. Their troubles were causing lots of budget problems, and many sponsors were doubting their ability to actually write software that worked.

The changes needed were somewhat obvious and elementary:

• write on paper the functions the software had to perform
• plan to have the people and other resources on hand
• write the software
• test the software
• integrate the software
• keep track of progress against the plan

Nothing incredible here, but nothing was happening at WestCo.

A colleague and I were to meet with WestCo and try to convince them to make necessary changes.

How could we use time to help convince them of change?

We left the east coast on the early morning flight, landed on the west coast, and arrived at WestCo right after lunch. We met for several hours as we proposed the changes that we believed would help them succeed and would sooth the worries of the sponsors.

The guys at WestCo didn’t like our suggestions – no surprise

We left the WestCo offices at about 3 PM. That gave them the rest of the afternoon to discuss our suggestions. It also gave them the night to sleep on the suggestions.

We returned to the WestCo offices mid-morning of the next day (a lot of boring motel hours for us, but thinking hours for WestCo). The WestCo folks had more time to discuss the suggested changes with their software developers.

WestCo agreed to our suggestions

Had we not allowed all the extra time for WestCo to absorb our suggestions, I doubt they would have agreed. With time, however, they decided that they could make the changes and the changes would probably help them.

Plan for time in change.

by Dwayne Phillips

A learning environment is one where people can learn. It may not be a teaching environment as that focuses on the teachers instead of the learner.

Several years back, author and consultant Jerry Weinberg told me a story about learning. The story telling was years ago, so my memory will fail me and I will have some of the facts wrong, but I hope the point comes through.

Jerry was teaching a five-day seminar. During the first session of the first morning, Jerry told the attendees that participation was voluntary. Anyone could not participate in any session as they wished. The attendees were adults and were free to take care of themselves.

After an hour or so, the seminar had a break. A man approached Jerry to check if Jerry really meant it about the voluntary nature of the seminar. Assured that Jerry did mean it, the man left the seminar and headed for the golf course.

Three days later, the man returned to the seminar. He approached Jerry again with the following:

I spent the last three days playing golf. I learned that I get bored with golf. I didn’t think I would, but I did. I had planned to retire in a couple of years, buy a home on a golf course, and play golf everyday for the rest of my life. I have changed my plans.

Thank you for helping me learn what I will do for the rest of my life.

Jerry didn’t “teach” the man about his life plans. Instead, he created an environment where the man could learn a life-changing lesson.

Teachers work in all sorts of different situations with different constraints. As a teacher, understand your constraints. Don’t assume you know the constraints until you test them. Do what you can to create a learning environment.

by Dwayne Phillips

I learn how NOT to backup an Apple computer.

Apple has a piece of software called “Time Machine.” It automates backups. The software puts all the files on the computer disk into a “big ball of bytes” on a backup disk. You must have Time Machine to access the individual files in the big ball of bytes.

I don’t like my individual files stored in a big ball of bytes accessible only by a proprietary piece of software. I am afraid that the proprietary piece of software will go away, and I will be stuck with a big ball of bytes that makes no sense.

I like the Unix (Linux, whatever) command line and the ls command. I suppose that is a function of age.

Given the above, it should not surprise people that for the past six years I kept a backup of my Apple iMac using scripts I wrote that employed the rsync command. If you read my previous post, you know that my iMac disk was erased and reformatted. I spent a week moving files back to the iMac. I learned a lesson:

Use the Apple Time Machine software for backups of an Apple computer.

Unix scripts using rsync and other commands works alright for data files (.doc, .xls, .c, etc.). They don’t work for applications and other things in between.

by Dwayne Phillips

My iMac disk dies so I have to recover everything from backup. But wait, not everything as my Google world is still there.

Short story about my Apple iMac computer. I was updating the operating system and the installer froze the machine. The guy at the Reston Apple Store was very helpful. In the end, however, he had to erase the disk drive and reformat it.

Not to worry – too much – as I had files copied to a backup disk. Putting all the stored files back on the iMac is a slow, painful, worrisome process (at least I worry while doing it).

I didn’t have to worry about everything. Much of my computing life is on Google. All the mail, email addresses, calendars, and much of what I have written in the past year or three are in the Google cloud. That is a big relief.