Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips This is what I find to be the biggest obstacle to managing knowledge in an organization. Knowledge management is pretty simple: when someone learns something, record that information. When someone else needs that information, they don’t have to learn it again for themselves. The expense of learning is not repeated. I have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I recount my first knowledge management effort in the early 1980s. Premise: knowledge cost resources, so save it. I was a newly graduated engineer in 1980. The US government sent me to the end of the earth to maintain electronic equipment. We had a lot of that stuff, and it failed fairly […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The second major explanation of what “not a good fit” means. Now for the second explanation (the first was in the immediately preceding post). This explanation is a bit more complex. Basically, it is the interviewing organization is mismanaged, a.k.a., they don’t know what they are doing. The interviewing organization is overworked. […]

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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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