Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

When my work is done, my day is done. That is what I want. Really? Caution. That leads down a perilous path.

I work from home most of the time. This pandemic and such and other factors mean that I don’t have an office in the building. I can go to the building now and then and sit in a “hotel seat.” Still, I have to punch the clock. I am supposed to be online and available for set hours of the day. Boring. I do my work, my day is done. Let’s get real.

Caution: that used to be called piece work.

When I was a kid, my neighbor ran his own business. He would pay kids to put ad papers in the doors of homeowners. We would run and run and run for hours in the hot Texas summer putting pieces of paper in doors. We were paid a penny per piece of paper. We were not paid by the hour. When we delivered our stack of 500 pieces of paper, we were paid $5.

Piece work: review a document, provide comments, write a report. The day is done. Be paid just for that one piece of work. What happens when there are no more documents to review, comments to provide, or reports to write? No pay.

Maybe I would like piece work. Maybe my paycheck would be much smaller. I wouldn’t like that.

Complicated? Yes. It is complicated for an employer to track all the pieces of work given to all the persons and pay them just for the pieces of work completed. Technology, however, has enabled employers to track all that and pay just the right amount.

Consider restaurants. Computers can track customers, money coming in, and number of waiters waiting. Not enough money coming in? You, you, and you go home. Your shift ended early. Your work is done. We won’t pay you as much money today as you expected. Complicated? Yes. Technology, however, enables this and some restaurant companies are using these systems now and have been for several years.

Piece work can be perilous. Take caution in wishing for it.

by Dwayne Phillips

Vin Scully died last week. He retired almost six years ago. I wrote about him in September 2016. Here is a repeat of that.

I won’t hear my old neighbor’s voice anymore. Vin Scully retires.

It was 40-something years ago. I was a kid playing in the back yard in southern California. I played to the music of Vin Scully describing Dodger baseball games.

I never saw our neighbor—Mr. Garcia. He had erected some sort of bamboo curtain along the fence so that we couldn’t see him as he toiled on this and that in his backyard. I always heard him. He had his AM radio blasting the Dodgers games six months a year. His radio was too loud as you could hear it several backyards away. No one complained about the noise because it wasn’t noise. It was Vin Scully.

Vin Scully was the sound of baseball. This was the 1970s, and America’s youth—all of it— played baseball. Vin Scully floated through the neighborhood.

As a kid, I thought all baseball announcers sounded like Vin Scully. It was one of the terrible disappointments of the transition from youth to adult that I learned how Vin Scully was the exception to the rule. How did the rest of America grow up without his voice?

Our neighbor, Mr. Garcia, treated the neighborhood to Vin Scully. Our neighbors shared the sound of a distant neighbor chatting at a baseball game. Vin Scully was our neighborhood even though he was at Chavez Ravine some hundred miles away.

Vin Scully retired. The world will be a little less neighborly.

…and Vin Scully has died. The world is a little less neighborly. That is a shame.

by Dwayne Phillips

It is important to use the right or correct word and avoid using the wrong word.

This is an old fundamental in writing and speaking. Why am I writing about this? Because I continue to encounter professionals who make this error often.

What is the right word and the wrong word? Consider cooking a potato. Put a raw potato into a pot containing water. Heat the pot of water containing the potato. The water bubbles and the potato cooks. Did we fry the potato or boil the potato? Which is the right word—fry or boil? Well, the accepted right word is boil. That is what happens to a potato when it sits in boiling water.

Quality assurance and quality control are not the same words and they don’t mean the same thing. One is the right word in some situations and the wrong word in other situations.

Function and attribute are not the same words and they don’t mean the same thing. One is the right word in some situations and the wrong word in other situations.

Analyze and test are not the same words and they don’t mean the same thing. One is the right word in some situations and the wrong word in other situations.

This could continue for days with more examples.

There are days when I am tired and I grab the first word that spills from my brain. If I have the energy, I stop myself. I look up the word (the Internet is a big help here) to ensure what spilled from my brain is the right or wrong word. Fatigue is a difficult foe. Please do what is needed to use the right word.

by Dwayne Phillips

I take the time to describe an old tool that helps us do what is asked. There is room for doing more, but we should at least do what is asked.

There is an old tool called a compliance matrix. For mathematicians, I apologize for the word “matrix” as this is a table of items, not a matrix. This is a simple tool. A table in a word processor works as does a spreadsheet.

One column of the compliance matrix contains the requirements or the things with which we seek to comply. Take the text of a requirements statement, “You must do A, B, C, and D.” Put A, B, C, and D in one cell each. We now have one requirement in each row in the left-most cell of the table. Now we have a list of the requirements going down the left side of the table. The remainder of each row shows that we have complied with or met that requirement. These could be statements or pointers to other things that actually meet the requirement.

Viola. We have a table that lists each requirement and how we meet each requirement. If there is a requirement that we do not meet, that is obvious as there is a big blank spot in the table. Back to work. Meet that requirement.

This is the simplest form of the compliance matrix. It is built manually and slowly. If there are 20,000 requirements, and there are systems that have that many requirements, this method may cost a lot of money and bore someone to tears. There are fancy applications (what we used to call software) that folks sell that make the compliance matrix easier to build and use when the requirements go into the thousands. Fewer than a hundred requirements? Just build a table in a word processor.

Compliance is not exciting. It is necessary when I am paid to meet requirements. The compliance matrix is an old tool that helps.

by Dwayne Phillips

As a writer and just about anyone else, we must be flexible in a rigid manner. The same is true for almost every adjective and its antonym.

A writer must be flexible. Except when the writer must be rigid. Except when exceptions arise.

The same goes for just about any adjective and its antonym and any person.

A person should be open to new ideas. Except when that person should be closed to frivolous ideas.

A person should be frivolous. Except when that person should be serious.

A person should be disciplined. Except when that person should be naive.

We could go on and on with these adjectives and their opposites. This unruly rule applies for almost all adjectives. I find a few for which this unruly rule does not apply. Those are important un-rules, but they are few.

by Dwayne Phillips

Data, data, data. Enough already. Just tell me something I don’t know.

• Data is the new oil.
• Data is the new bacon.
• Data will fuel the economies of the future.
• Data will determine the winner of the next world war.
• Data, data, data.

I work with data. On some days, some folks call me a data scientist. I work with artificial intelligence and machine learning (I have for 40 years—yes, I am that old). I’m sick of data. Data schmata, just tell me something I don’t know.

This links to an article about using data to teach kids how to hit a baseball. DATA? They are using cameras to record how kids swing a stick and showing them ways to improve. Howard Hughes did that in the 1930s. Today, however, this is DATA.

Gosh. It is information or knowledge or wisdom or something. Tell the kid to step straight ahead and keep his head down. If the kid can resist all natural reactions to a sphere hurled at him, he will hit. DATA? Give me a break.

We have records of all sorts of things. Who called whom on the telephone. Who ate what and when. Who read what. Who wrote what. Who stood on what street corner on what day. Where did we go after going to the grocery store. What did we buy at the grocery store (hint, we probably bought groceries).

We now call all that old stuff DATA. Excuse me, I feel the need to go to the bathroom.

by Dwayne Phillips

Overwhelmed with many tasks and people? Grab a clipboard and a pencil.

This one may require a clipboard with a bigger clip that has a bigger capacity than most, but the basic tools will suffice.

There are too many tasks and too many people. Emails and text messages and notes from here and there are flooding in a piling high in my mind. And then someone asks me, “What about that thing I asked you last week? Is it finished?” Huh?

For each message, write a note on a piece of paper and clip it to the board. Scribble on that piece of paper. Write just enough references and pointers so details can be found. Date every scribble and record all names. When the inevitable question arrives, flip through the paper to find the answer. Scribble the facts of the question on the paper. When something is finished, remove the paper from the clipboard and place it in a file for later reference.

The clipboard is scalable (a word folks like to use these days). When there are many items in the air, the pile of paper is larger. The pile is smaller when there are fewer items of urgency. There are always more pencils available as well as blank pieces of paper.

The clipboard is portable. No matter the location, the clipboard is at hand. No power? No problem. No battery? No problem. No WiFi? Same answer. Many questions, and they all have the same answer.

Of course people think it odd to be walking about with a clipboard of papers and a pencil (if possible, carry the pencil behind an ear for affect). People will not think it odd for a person to have answers for every little thing that occurs.

Try it. It has worked and will continue to work.

by Dwayne Phillips

These inconvenient facts seem to be everywhere. They are inconvenient, however, only when we have a story to tell that denies reality.

There are some old sayings like, “opinions being mugged by facts,” and “don’t confuse my opinion with facts,” and “there is nothing like facts getting in the way of my opinion,” and such silly things.

Years ago, a famous politician made a non-fiction movie in which computer-generated fictional scenes were presented as non-fiction actual scenes of nature. After awards were presented, the facts came to the surface. There was this famous newspaper that won a major award with a non-fiction story. Later, however, the facts surfaced that it was all made up, i.e., the inconvenient facts came to light. One major newsroom showed a factual government document that was several decades old. It took about an hour for the facts to show that the old government document used brand new fonts that didn’t agree with the date on the document. Ouch. Why?

Much closer to home, I recently attended a user engagement meeting that was hailed as a great success. The inconvenient facts, however, were that zero users attended the meeting. The user engagement engaged no users because the users were not engaged in the product one little bit. Ouch. The facts didn’t meet the story that was told.

We can all do better. Let’s have our facts and state them in our story. Facts are inconvenient only when we ignore them and someone else brings them to light afterwards. It doesn’t have to be that way. Otherwise, facts are facts. Write a story that agrees with the facts.

by Dwayne Phillips

This is one of the fundamental questions that persons working projects need to answer. We know what we are attempting, but we don’t know the actual progress and how that compares to the expected progress.

There are several fundamental questions that should be asked and answered by people working on projects. Among those are:

• Whatcha’ doin’?
• When’ll ya’be’done?

The question for this blog post is how’sit goin’? That is short for, “How is it going? How is the task proceeding? How does the actual work compare to the expected work?”

We ask this question of persons who have an assigned task in a project. We have some expectation of the work involved. We need to know how large an error we had in “some expectation.” The actual work is always different from the expected work. What is the delta?

Several things here for everyone attempting to accomplish work:

Be ready to answer clearly. Answers such as, “Okay. You know, shrug,” are insufficient. Everyone, including the person attempting to accomplish work, needs to have a brief and clear answer.

Don’t be defensive. Everyone asks this question of everyone else everyday. No one is being highlighted for special treatment either good or bad. We seek information about the task, not the person. We seek to improve the management of the work, not review a person’s abilities.

As managers of work, clearly state these to the persons performing the work. Those persons will be better able to answer, and your job will become much easier.

by Dwayne Phillips

Though we hate to admit it, the goal of us who work in computing is to produce a TPS report.

The “TPS Report” is the butt of all office jokes. It is meaningless paperwork that serves no purpose. For a full explanation, see the Wikipedia page on it. Those of us who work in computing have important things to do. We are saving the world or at least a part of the world that we deem important. Right? Huh? Please?

We do software development, software engineering, data, big data, even bigger data, science about all that really big-big-big data, and other such wonderfulness.

Sorry fellow computing-ers. Our job is to make it easy for others to do TPS reports and other such things. Sorry. We work in a business or in a government. If we do not add to the profits of the business or the mission of the government, we do not work.

One of the primary tasks in a business and in a government is to inform others. People inform others with reports. We may call them pages, portals, or (one of my favorites) “dynamic content,” but they are all forms of reports. If we can make it easier for others to inform others, we work and are paid. Otherwise, we are just doing things that interest us. Interesting things are interesting, but usually don’t provide food, clothing, and shelter to ourselves and our families.

Want a job? Want to keep a job? Discover what others are doing to inform others. Use computing to make that easier.