Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips There is a simple step that will push you and yours to produce better goods and services. Want higher quality? Want people to delight in your products? Want to accomplish these and other quality improvement goals without spending any money? Yes, yes, and Y E S! Here it is: Put you name […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have yet another case where a manager failed to perform the job title, but someone else was fired. This is an interesting story. A software tester wrote some software to run all the tests. The tester didn’t have anything to do, so the tester sat around for five years twiddling thumbs. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This isn’t politics, it is groups of people endeavoring to accomplish something. Give them a gift—policies. A policy is one of the best gifts upper managers can give to an organization. No, I’m not kidding. We have to understand what a policy is and how we use it. A policy is a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Magic happens in fairy tales, not real life. Stop wishing for it to appear. Do the work instead. I don’t want to manage the work and lead the people. I want magic to happen. I want someone to create a self-managing organization. oooh aaah this is special. Grow up folks. Magic is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yet another new occupation comes from yet another bad practice. For the past several years surveying the job market, I kept finding ads for a position called DevOps. Some reading and discussions sort of brought me to an understanding of what that is. Once again, I learned that I did this new […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I emphasize fundamentals in my work. One such fundamental is the old cliche about planning and working (see title). I find it still applies—even with “new” methods like Agile. Plan your work, work your plan I heard that a lot in the 1980s. I find it to be one of those things […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are many almost insurmountable jobs out there. Are any of them, however, your job? I my current search for employment, I talk to people here and there about jobs. Several of the people I have met describe their jobs as the most impossible in the universe. The jobs they describe are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Often it is better to let people watch a game show at work while they eat lunch. Here is a sad but true story. In the early 1990s I worked in a big computing laboratory. At one end of the multi-thousand-square-foot facility we had a “conference” room. This room had a sink, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the arrangement of furniture in an office is far more important than a first glance indicates. Once upon a time, I worked in an organization that moved into some office spaces that were previously occupied by another organization. We inherited their office furniture and their arrangement of office furniture. In the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes projects “lose their way.” Of course that is impossible as what really happens is that people come and go and change their minds. In government, we had a phrase about projects that seemed to go forever and consume every penny in sight and produce nothing: They lost their way Some of […]

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