Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Here are some items I see often when working with college engineering and science students – part 1.

For the past couple of years, I have been working with engineering and science students at George Mason University on their writing. I found myself spending the vast majority of the time discussing a small set of items. This post and the next post will discuss these common items. This first post discusses what I call the “Big Concepts.” The next post will discuss the “Smaller Concepts.”

Does this thing make sense?

I suppose that this is the biggest concept. It is the one question writers must ask themselves. Since the writer wrote the piece, it is also one of the more difficult questions to answer. Other readers can answer the question easily. Hence, find someone else to read what you write.

Raise your thoughts

The writer should back away from the individual words and try to “focus on the big picture.” (That is a contradiction that I use just to grab attention. Don’t use it yourself.) Try to express:

• one thought per section
• one thought per paragraph
• one thought per sentence.

Write in paragraphs

Write paragraph by paragraph. There should be one thought per paragraph. State those single thoughts in order. Does the flow of thoughts make any sense? If not, rearrange, add, and subtract until they do.

Order of writing

You don’t have to write the sections and paragraphs in order. You can write the last section first, the middle section second, and so on. The first section is often the most difficult to write, so leave it until later after your mind is humming along.

by Dwayne Phillips

Introduce yourself by name.

I was sitting in a meeting that had started five minutes earlier. The person to my right was presiding over the meeting and was talking without pause. I recognized enough of what he was saying to know that I was in the right meeting, but I didn’t know anyone in the meeting. I had never seen any of them before, and I didn’t know any of their names.

Something spurred me and I said something like, “I don’t know anyone here. Could we go around the table and introduce ourselves? My name is Dwayne Phillips.”

The person presiding raised his eyes towards me, his eyebrows lifted several inches, and he exclaimed, “You’re Dwayne Phillips? I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks, but I couldn’t find you in any of our systems. I need to talk to you!”

Our lives, the person presiding and me, changed in that moment. We worked together for the next ten years on various projects. All because I said,

My name is Dwayne Phillips.

Since that day I have repeated this little practice many times. It changes everything. I am not sure why, but I have seen it work well too many times to forget it.

by Dwayne Phillips

While racing through the day from event to event, add five minutes to an event. During those five minutes, do something wonderful for someone else who is at the same event.

Most of the people I know are busy. Most of the people I know are so busy that they just get by everyday. There is day is:

1. Wake
2. Run from place to place for 16 or 18 hours
3. Go to bed
4. Repeat steps 1. through 3.

Step 2. is a series of events. Maybe there is a meeting; maybe there is an hour in the grocery store, and maybe it is an hour of kids at soccer practice or ballet or music lessons or homework. Every event consumes a period of time.

Here is how to change the world:

Add five minutes to that event’s period of time. In those five minutes, do something wonderful for someone who is also at the event.

Some ideas:

• Hold someone’s baby while they sit and relax.
• Help someone else’s son take off his soccer cleats and socks and shin guards and have a drink of water.
• Give a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to someone else’s kid who looks pale and low on blood sugar.
• Pour a cup of coffee from your thermos (that you made just for this) and give it to the music teacher.
• Shave five minutes from your kid’s lesson so the teacher has five minutes to sit and sip coffee.

I could go on with the list. I trust that you understand the concept and the five minutes.

I know the math doesn’t work. If you spend an extra five minutes of each hour, after 12 hours you have missed an entire hour. You only have 11 hours and not 12 or 12 hours and not 13 or something like that. I understand that. I am pretty good at math.

Nevertheless, those five minutes do fit into the day. I have tested this idea, and it works.

by Dwayne Phillips

Small projects are great for new engineers. The new engineers learn so many different aspects of building a system on a small project. I used to think that; I no longer do. Instead, I think that small or smaller projects carry with them a curse that can ruin an engineer or programmer or manager.

On larger projects, one person cannot do everything. Hence, the larger project will employ:

• Project manager
• Systems engineer
• Subject matter expert
• Contract administrator
• Hardware designer
• Software designer
• Hardware builder
• Hardware tester
• Software programmer
• Software tester
• System integrator
• and so on

When all these different people are present, it is obvious that these different skill sets are employed.

On a small project, you probably have

• One person in charge
• One hardware person
• One software person

These three people do all the tasks done by the longer list of people above. Each person dord a little of this for a while, then a little of that for a while, and then a little of some other thing for a while.

So, what’s the curse? I mean, the small project looks like fun. A new person will be able to experience many different things. What’s wrong with that?

For about the first half of my career, I worked on smaller projects. It was great. Then I attempted to work larger problems. I failed miserably. I couldn’t do everything in the schedule required. I just didn’t “scale” well enough in that I couldn’t work 24 hours a day five days a week.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just bring on some more people just like me, and the group of us will aggregate to the necessary number of hours.”

That didn’t work. I needed specialists to complete the larger project. Part of the curse from the small project meant that I didn’t know what type of specialists I needed. I didn’t know what a systems engineer did. I didn’t know the difference between a software designer, a software programmer, and a software tester. I had done those three tasks all by myself before, or at least I thought I had. Maybe I had, but then maybe I hadn’t. One day I met a professional software tester. She spent most of a week trying to explain to me what real software testers did for a living. I struggled to understand because I had never seen a real software tester work. That was part of the curse of the small project – I had not seen real specialists do real specialized jobs.

On small projects, everything runs together. One person does a dozen jobs switching mindlessly from one to another. The key word is “mindlessly.” The one person, me, doesn’t understand what is happening as it all seems natural. Besides, mindlessly working on anything is fraught with peril. The mind should be fully engaged at all times.

Let’s start to make a list here, a list of what comes from the curse of the small project.

• I didn’t understand what specialists did.
• I didn’t understand what specialization was.
• I didn’t understand how well specialists did their special jobs.
• I didn’t understand how to scale work.
• I didn’t understand how to work with people who had special skills.
• I didn’t understand how to work with people who had different backgrounds.
• I didn’t understand how complicated things were with a bunch of people working together.
• I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.
• I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was.

That is enough of a list for now. I’m reliving too many bad memories from my early attempts at large projects. The side affects of the curse of the small project are lingering with me more than I realized.

At this point in the post, I should recommend something – something that will make the reader’s life easier than what I lived. Here it is:

Let a new engineer or programmer or manager work a couple short, small projects. Explain to them the many different roles they played on the small project. Quickly move them to a large project with a large number of diverse specialists. Ensure that they see and understand the roles of the specialists and how much each specialist knows about their specialty. Ensure that they understand that they don’t have the skills and expertise that the specialists have.

Maybe the new person will know what they don’t know.

by Dwayne Phillips

I  obtain the PMI’s Project Management Professional certification.

It seemed that every request for proposal that we received from the government wanted the same thing: a certified project manager.  It didn’t matter that a person, like me, had years of experience, three degrees, and had written several books on project management (like these). No, they asked for a certification. Many specifically called for the PMP (the Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute).

I first encountered the PMI and PMP while working in Lagos, Nigeria (West Africa) in 1995. I followed its development and growing popularity over the years. Several times in the past ten years I have grabbed a PMI book and started reading with the idea of maybe going for the certification. I stopped reading after a couple of weeks. I just didn’t want to do the memorization required.

That has been the catch with the PMP for me – the memorization. I never learned anything about project management with the PMP. I did memorize the PMP definitions. Different groups of people define “budget” and “risk” differently. When going for the PMP, you memorize the PMP definitions and hope that you forget all the all definitions.

Requirements

The PMI has a few requirements to meet their certification. The first is experience. No problem there as I had a couple of decades of managing projects that I could cite.

The second is passing the PMP exam. That was the problem. I didn’t know the PMI’s definitions. Hence, the next step,

Preparation

I went to the Internet to learn how other people had prepared for the PMP. I found pretty good advice, so I followed it. This comprised two tasks: reading and taking practice tests.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought the PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge. I read it through one time highlighting what I thought were key terms and sentences. I will not kid you, it was boring. The PMBOK doesn’t have any questions in it, so there was no practice testing.

I went to examcentral.net. They provide free exam questions. I did a 20-question test every day (the study period lasted two months). I was able to score in the 70s every time. Whenever I hit a question that made absolutely no sense, I took notes.

My Second Book to Study

I went back to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a book that was written for test prep and exam questions. I found this one by Andy Crowe. I read it and highlighted key terms.

I read Crowe’s book a second time, highlighting more text, and then taking the 20-question exams at the end of each chapter. I scored in the 80s on those tests.

I continued every day to take a 20-question test from exam central dot net.

I went back to the PMBOK and read it a second time.

This all took about 60 days. I studied about an hour a day. No more than that. An hour a day was all I could take. This is boring folks.

Memorization

I memorized a lot. I didn’t like that, but I did it.

There is one table in the PMBOK that must be memorized. Across the top are five Process Groups. Down the side are nine Knowledge Areas. Inside the table are 42 processes. Every day I wrote that table from memory.

Each of the 42 processes has (1) inputs, (2) tools and techniques, and (3) outputs. I memorized the outputs of the processes. I was too lazy to memorize the other things.

Practice Tests

I took my PMP exam on a Saturday. Two Saturdays before, I took a 200-question practice test. One Saturday before, I took a 200-question practice test. You have four hours to complete the 200 questions. I finished each test in two hours. I scored 78% on the first practice and 88% on the second practice.

A 200-question test is no fun. The practice sessions were essential. I learned to notice when I started daydreaming and when I became tired. At those times I stood and walked around.

I took a 20-question short practice test every day. In all, I think I did 1,500 practice questions. I highly recommend that.

The Exam

Oh boy, that was an experience.

I went to a local “testing center.” This is a place where a company administers all sorts of tests. There were a bunch of 10-year-olds going through taking some kind of test from Johns Hopkins or something. I don’t get it.

Anyways, we were given a locker to put everything. I could not take my pencil, my watch, my bottle of water, my peppermint candy into the test area. I had a cold and was taking medicine and sucking candy to keep from coughing.

“No problem,” the nice lady told me. “You can come out here as often as you want for a drink of water.”

Great, come out every half hour and gulp water.

I have to admit that I may have “cheated” on the exam. At break, I would put two or three peppermints in my mouth, walk into the test room, keep one in my mouth and put the others on the desk. That way I wouldn’t have to go out as often.

The test room contained a bunch of cubicles with computers. The test is on a computer and is multiple choice. It is boring. I mean it is really boring.

Oh, get a good night’s sleep, eat a good breakfast, and all that. Sometimes life gets in the way. I slept four hours the night before the test and sat in meetings all morning before the test. The meetings had nothing to do with the test material. I also ran an errand on the way to the test center, so lunch comprised two cold hot dogs from a gas station.

I Pass

I went slowly on the exam. I took three hours instead of the two I needed for the practice exams. I don’t know what my score on the exam was. They don’t tell you that. All I know is that I passed and am now a PMP.

…and I don’t have to memorize any more definitions.

What did I Learn?

I guess my brain is not dead yet as I can still memorize a lot of stuff. And I can sit in a test center for three dehydrating hours and pass a test.

One Final Tip

The Book that Helped Me Memorize Everything

Something that helped me memorize all this stuff was a book I bought years ago. This book contains lots of memory techniques. I used many of them during study and during the test.

I highly recommend it, even if you aren’t cramming for a test.

Tony Buzan wrote it years ago.

by Dwayne Phillips

Avoid asking an engineer or some other non-writer to write a complete first draft of a document. The result will be bad, but the non-writer will love it more than himself.

There are few anguishes known to man as that experienced when a manager tells an engineer or some other professional who is not a professional writer, “This isn’t bad for a first draft, but we need some major rewrites or maybe just toss it and start from scratch.”

Professionals, who are not professional writers, pour their blood, sweat, and tears into pieces of writing. Every word is painful, but they smash their fingers through the keyboard to put the letters on the computer screen and fulfill their commitment as a professional. The result – the first draft – is as precious to them as anything they have ever produced.

Awful or beautiful (on rare occasions), the pride of ownership and the expense of the soul endear the writer of the first draft to their work. Rewrite it? Why not ask for their first-born child? Ask instead for something less treasured such as all the blood that flows through their veins.

This is the curse of the first draft: it is bad, yet it is treasured, and the writer cannot change it.

Remedies to this curse are not known; preventions, however, are. Avert the curse with one word – outline. Now the professional writers, the writers of verse and novels, can cringe and imagine scratching their teeth on a chalkboard. The other professionals and their managers can find solace.

• Outline the work
• Discuss the outline
• Change the outline
• Outline in greater detail
• Discuss the outline
• Change the outline
• Outline in greater detail
• Discuss the outline
• Change the outline

Repeat until the outline contains a topic for every paragraph to be written. Now, the blood, sweat, and tears have been shared by a group of people. The contributions of each person are slight compared to the heart and soul given in a full first draft. Things can still be changed. The world will be safe as anguish has been vanquished.

Is this description overly dramatic? Perhaps, but wait until you meet an engineer who has just seen his manager throw his first draft into the trash and ask for another try.

by Dwayne Phillips

Systems are built to satisfy the requirements of the user. Sometimes, engineers want to add things, i.e., they desire to add things. Such are “desire-ments,” and they can kill projects.

I walked into an existing project. Well, I  wasn’t in the middle of the project, but I was to work with a company on a new project. They couldn’t start the new project until they had finished an existing project. There were a couple of problems on the existing project. Solutions were necessary for the world to continue orbiting about the sun.

We investigated the problems. After several hours of heated discussion and filling and erasing the white board and filling it again, the conclusion was:

There were no problems.

The prior project was finished, and we moved to the new project.

Miracle? No. Then what? The answer was that the project was crippled by

Desirements

The system that had been built and it met all the requirements of the eventual users. The engineers on the project wanted to add a few more functions. The key word is that they “wanted” to add functions. The extra functions were not required, but desired. Hence, the term desire-ments.

Engineers should strive to not only satisfy the users, but thrill them. Extra features are great, but – and I have to add a B I G  B U T here, extra features cannot kill the project.

Let’s state something that we have to remember from time to time:

Projects at work are meant to accomplish necessary work.

That does not always equate to fun. That does not always equate to including my favorite things because that will increase my job satisfaction. Work is work. Hobbies are hobbies. Let’s try not to confuse the two, and let’s try to keep the desirements from clobbering the requirements.

by Dwayne Phillips

I reminisce about tracing paper.

When I was a kid, I would trace things. Now that I think about it, I recall tracing some things when I was in graduate school working on a PhD. Whoa.

Anyways, I would trace things. These things were for school projects most of the time, but sometimes I would trace things just for fun. It felt good to be able to create a picture, even if I was “cheating” by using a lot of another person’s work.

I haven’t seen tracing paper in years. I guess the last time I saw it was when I was doing that tracing as part of a PhD. I learned this morning that you can still buy tracing paper. Here is one source.

But what happened to tracing? I guess it was yet another casualty of computers and printers and great graphics software. Why trace something when you can draw perfect squares and circles and curves with the dragging of a mouse? Why trace when you can copy am image from anywhere on the Internet and past it into just about anything.

Still, there was skill involved in tracing. I had to place my pencil in the right spot, move my hand smoothly without jitterring, and lift it just right. Kids don’t have that experience today. Just move a mouse over a large spot and click. It just isn’t the same.

One of these slow days, I think I will find some tracing paper, sit with my grandchildren, and show them the type of thing people did before computers were everywhere.

by Dwayne Phillips

When you call me that, smile

from “The Virginian: a horseman of the plains” by Owen Wister

The statement above is one of the most misquoted from American literature, movie folklore, and culture. The misquote is:

smile when you say that

The implication is simple, if you are smiling, you can say just about anything to anyone. The smile erases all harm in the words and conveys the I am your friend message.

There is something about a smile that seems to open eyes, not literally, but opens the eyes to the inside of the person. Notice the eyes of people in a crowd. They eyes are open, but the person does not appear. When someone greets the person with a smile, the person appears through the eyes.

You can read most of The Virginian at Google Books. It is also for sale at Barnes and Noble.com. No doubt, you can find it at a local library. Its the best.

by Dwayne Phillips

VE Day Celebration

This is a famous photograph taken during the celebration that ensued when victory in Europe WW II was celebrated. Victory was being celebrated as in “we won.” Also being celebrated was that the killing stopped. The sailor kissing the girl wasn’t going to be killed.

How does this relate to Osama bin Laden? Yesterday’s blog post relayed my shock at the celebrations of bin Laden’s death. On second thought…

I cannot find a photo of an American generation celebrating an event since the end of WW II. Were there any big celebrations at

• the end of the Korean police action?
• the Vietnam War?
• the fall of the Berlin Wall?
• Gulf War I?
• Gulf War II?

George W. Bush tried to have a famous photo on the aircraft carrier at the end of the first phase of Gulf War II. That backfired as more Americans were killed after that event than before that event.

Perhaps the “bin Laden is dead” celebrations were a shot at recreating the photo that has haunted every American generation since that day in 1945. Maybe the little celebrations have something behind them.

I think it is a shame that the death of bin Laden doesn’t mean that the killing will stop. I am afraid that there will be a rise in killing. I hope that rise will be short lived. Maybe one day…