Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips. There are a lot of standards today guiding our behavior. There seem to be a lot of people today who ignore the standards and yet they succeed. It is illegal in many places to talk on a cell phone while driving. It is illegal in many places to send text messages while […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Tradeoffs involve decisions. You choose that one thing is more important than another. This is not popular, especially in public projects. Last week I saw a post about people wanting to build high-speed train lines between cities. This would reduce automobile traffic between the cities, provide construction jobs, provide operations and maintenance […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is always one more solution. Sometimes we just need a little more of this or that to see it. And when people claim no more solutions, they are telling us all sorts of things. I liked Seth Godin’s recent blog post. In it, Seth wrote: The only possible response … isn’t. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Don’t let recent events explain a current situation when prior events combined with latency provide a better explanation. I spent a week on the Colorado River going through the Grand Canyon. I am posting a number of stories from that week. In this post, I return to my regular blogging topics and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips My printed book from FastPencil is in hand. It took about three weeks for FastPencil to transform a PDF file to a paperback book. It is 6″x9″ and 155 pages. Lessons Learned: 10-point font is too small for my eyes I chose a creme paper instead of white, I wish I had […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are problems and there are methods of solving them. Given these two items, there are four cases that can define projects. Let’s consider the cases and how to avoid the more painful ones. In some of my books I have written about projects that went astray, i.e. they were disasters with […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Systems builders should concentrate on one thing – improving the work of the people who will use the system. Sometimes we lose sight of what we are doing. We build systems. Why? Well, to make money for our employer. We hope the system makes money for the organization that uses it. This […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Life is full of bad experiences. There is always something that can be learned in each experience. The bad experience is a form of tuition. The learning is a form of education. Nothing guarantees we get the education with the tuition. The education, however, is there for our choosing. College is pretty […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Technical debt in a system builds as changes are made to the system. At some point, the expense and risk of the next change is prohibitive. This is the first post I will make about fill-in-the-blank debt. These all go back to the concept of technical debt in a technical system. Systems […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Situations change and people adapt to those changes. Has adapting to chance taken away your  ability to adapt? Change is constant Okay, that is neither original nor brilliant. It does, however, describe my experiences. Groups of people adapt Another observation that is neither original nor brilliant. What many people fail to observe […]

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