Working Up

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

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Significant Digits: Another Forgotten Fundamental

June 9th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Regardless of what Excel tells us, significant digits (remember that?) tells us otherwise. Recall something called significant digits from high school math? Consider calculating something with two numbers. One number has two digits while the other number has three digits. The answer can only have two digits. For example, 23 x 123 […]

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Tags: Analysis · Clarity · Computing · Estimation · General Systems Thinking

Too Bad They Used a Cliche

February 1st, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I wish I knew what they meant, but, unfortunately, they used a cliche. Oh, what a cute cliche. I wonder what the writer actually meant. I’ll never know because the writer used that cliche instead of words with meaning.

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Tags: Clarity · Communication

The Most Important Five Minutes of My Day

December 3rd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Five minutes of quiet thought. Each morning, at the end of Internet viewing and blogging and before I “go to work,” I sit for five quiet minutes and drink coffee. I stare into space. I am not wasting time. It is an investment, one of the sharpening-the-saw moments from a self-help best-selling […]

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Tags: Breathe · Clarity · Meetings · Process

The Aspirin Illusion

September 10th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I’m caught in the aspirin illusion yet again. When will I learn? The suppression of pain instead of the eradication of the disease for which the pain is a warning. Gerald M. Weinberg Here is my story… I had headaches in the mornings. I took Excedrin extra strength, migraine, etc. which is […]

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Tags: Adapting · Clarity · Health

Too Many Words

February 9th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Yet another reason for brevity: the more the words, the more the mistakes. There must be some statistic somewhere that shows the number of mistakes per 1,000 words that writers make (is it a mistake to end a sentence with the word “make?” Did I put my punctuation marks in the right […]

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Tags: Brevity · Clarity · Communication · Writing

We Get One Chance

February 5th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips We each get one chance to share an idea with others. I cannot overemphasize the need to be ready for that chance. I have been working with a colleague for several years now. This colleague has an idea he wants to present to others. He has been talking about the one idea […]

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Tags: Clarity · Communication · People