Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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The Bottleneck

March 16th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips These new tools, ahem all that AI, are boosting productivity in our work. And then we hit the bottleneck and come to an emergency inducing crisis. Yesterday and today I have been using one of these new tools (some folks them AI, I don’t). I have accomplished in an hour what would […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Chaos · Emergency · Failure · Management · Tools · Work

AI, Productivity, and Choice

March 9th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Some AI tools increase productivity in some areas. Okay, I’m done with this task. Now what? That choice can be vexing. I used an AI tool (won’t mention which one). I completed a two-day task in an hour. Now what? Hey boss, tell me what to do now. One answer: go to […]

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Tags: Analysis · Artificial Intelligence · Choose · Management · Time · Tools

The Middle Manager and the Entry-Level Employee

March 2nd, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The middle manager has been replaced by the entry-level employee. What? Ah, the bane of 20th century civilization—the middleman. The middleman was the person in the middle who did nothing but pass a product along from the producer to the consumer. The middleman did nothing of value, but took a good 10% […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Computing · Jobs · Management

Machine-Aided Decisions

January 15th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips We have come a long way with AI aiding in decisions. The machine is powerful and new. Or is it? AI is helping us decide what to do. It performs analysis in seconds that would have taken weeks or months. Wow! Look at us now—machine-aided decisions. Great new stuff. Or is it? […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Decide · Humility · Humor · Machine Learning · Management · Technology

Be Curt … It’s Okay

January 12th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The one great advantage to working with a chatbot. curt: adjective, using or expressed in few words, in a way perceived as rude. Ah, that’s it. That’s what I like about working with a chattering bot: I can be curt and I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. I was attempting to create a […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Competence · Computing · Language · Word

AI Coding of Sorts

January 8th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Software that writes software is quite helpful. Well, maybe sort of not. MIT jumps into the fray and asks a few dozen programmers if AI that writes software is helpful to people who write software. First, the folks at MIT are smart enough to not base a survey piece on a survey […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Computing · People · Programming · Tools

It All Comes Down to the Bathroom

January 5th, 2026 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips This current AI boom all comes down to the cost of providing bathrooms for people. Or so it seems. I think we are over thinking the idea of what we think about these chattering bots. Folks, the chatbot is just software running on a computer. Yes, some of that software makes me […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · General Systems Thinking · Money · People · Systems

The Death of AI $$$

December 29th, 2025 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips All this $$$ is killing AI. I used to work in AI. That means that I researched things that might allow us to do things that we couldn’t do. I attempted to instruct a computer or, as we used to say, I attempted to write a computer program to do something that […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Communication · Language · Money · Technology · Word

Cleverly Deceptive

December 15th, 2025 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips AI has eaten the world. It is the latest and greatest thing…or is it? I hang around America’s Federal government. There are many new programs in our Federal government to push and pull and take advantage of AI. AI will do wonders. Isn’t it wonderfully wonderful? Sigh. Perhaps I am just too […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Engineering · Language · Mathematics · Systems

Fundamentals and Fads

December 11th, 2025 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips It must be difficult running a college and deciding what departments to create and what degrees to offer. It seems only yesterday that colleges started offering degrees in Data Science. Data Science was the sexiest job of the century or so said an article in Harvard Business Review. I guess they missed […]

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Data Science · Learning · Systems · Teaching