Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we should assign one person. We already know that, so why don’t we do it? There is some old cliche about too many cooks in the kitchen or too many cooks stirring the pot or something. There is a a current cliche about too many people in the room I head […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Knowing how to repair a system indicates something about its quality. I know how to start the MS Windows task manager. You press the Crtl-Alt-Del keys at the same time. A window pops and displays option. One option is the task manager. The task manager allows me to kill processes that are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The meeting is over. Hereafter, we are having a friendly chat.

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by Dwayne Phillips Often, greater efficiency means sharing resources that were previously not shared. When a shared resource breaks, everyone suffers. Twenty years ago I worked in a computing lab that suffered great improvements in efficiency. Yes, we improved and suffered at the same time. We began sharing resources. We had computers that were idle […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Unless we are rich, we neglect those persons and things that are far from the normal. Economy requires neglect; sorry. In schools, we have big classes. We try to reach the middle of the class, the group near the center of the normal distribution (we used to call this distribution the “bell […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If you are on the critical path of a project, you often behave in ways that don’t seem to make sense. The critical path of a project means a lot of things to different people. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the concept. One way to think of the critical path is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here are the secrets to success in tech and any other business. (No, there isn’t anything earth-shattering here.) Okay, here it is, right at the start: Have smart people work on worthwhile problems. Sorry, I told you in the summary that this wouldn’t be earth shattering. So, let’s delve into this a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I review a requirements-management scheme that indicates no requirements management. I once worked in an organization that built systems. Everyone worked very hard and very long hours. There was one problem: We never delivered a single system Why not? The problem was with managing requirements. Each month we held a requirements meeting. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We all say that we are people of integrity. But are we? I hate to write this blog post. I know I hate to do it because I have been meaning to write it for seven or eight years, but still haven’t done it. Well, here goes. We like to say that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We try to relearn this again: people have to use technology in some “smart” way. Money goes to big data projects, but not much comes back. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, it was with fill-in-the-blank-with-one-of-those-new-technologies-that-was-going-to-change-the-world-by-itself. People use technology. Well, sometimes we use it, and sometimes we use it in […]

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