Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips For some reason (and we have a lot of these reasons), we just let things go when we know better. Yes, that thing doesn’t work right, but you know, we just don’t fix it because… I don’t like fixing things It is someone else’s problem, they broke it or they installed it […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of us don’t want to stretch things at work. Stretching can create tension, and tension is, well, tense. It is okay. Go ahead and do it. I wish I remember where I was when I first heard or read the statement, You don’t need permission to do your job well. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here is a simple exercise you can use with your team to learn something about how well you work together. Step 1: Get a deck of playing cards. Step 2: Hand every person on your team some cards. Hand some person a couple of cards and hand some persons a dozen cards. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The most important decision about a project may be when we say, “It is over.” Watching college (semi- or mostly-professional) football this weekend. Several times today I see a 19 to 21-year old score a touchdown and in great glee make enough of the wrong motions to be flagged for excessive celebration […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We review A fundamental of project planning, execution, and incurring risk. Risk is the answer to the question, “What could possibly go wrong?” The answer is, “Many things could go wrong.” Some of the possible wrong, however, is avoidable. We can prepare better and ensure we do better. The key word in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips What do you do with a person who isn’t doing their job, but seems to do other things? Fire him. He admits he doesn’t know how to do all the things you want him to do. He admits that he just doesn’t learn fast and will take along time to do the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Someone on the team needs to be a little farther away from the problem than the rest of us. Once upon a time…a team of engineers and such had a major design review in Florida. The team didn’t live in Florida. The head of the team, thoroughly enmeshed in the details of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Which way is your team facing? When? Why? Consider a few options. If we are all facing the same direction…we can’t shake hands, that only happens when we face opposite directions. We can’t see what is sneaking up behind our colleague, again that only happens when we face opposite directions. If we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Jugglers know this. Managers and builders should know this. Let the little things fall without over reacting. Jugglers have to do this. They may be a bit off balance, so they let a ball fall to the ground. An alternative is to over react and reach for that one ball and lose […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Want to see knowledge management in action? Go to, of all places, the library. No, we won’t go to the library to find a book all about knowledge management. We will go to the library to see knowledge management in real life. Look about. We are surrounded by reusable modules of knowledge […]

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