Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Facebook puts a data center near the arctic circle. The natural cold air will cool the computers. Why is this news? Why is this hailed as a brilliant “green” action? It was December of 1980. We had a small room with a dozen racks of heat-producing equipment that needed to be cooled. […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips All bureaucracies, in my experience, stop the flow of information at each level of the hierachy. About half the important information is stopped at each level. There is hope, but people at the top have to work hard at getting the information they are being denied. The title of this post is […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips There are many pleasures that come with managing a project. One is learning that you didn’t ruin the people who worked with you. Author and consultant Jerry Weinberg once wrote: One of the pleasures of having your children grow up is seeing that you didn’t ruin them after all. My corollary of […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips In government acquisition, the government employees make the decisions about projects. They often have to decide whether to continue or cancel a troubled project. The decision they often render is odd. I worked in government acquisition circles for over 25 years. One of the principle tenets of that field is: Contractor employees  […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips When things are going well, be careful about adding more “good” things. An addition is a foreign element and will change the situation. I wish we had a bigger budget so we could do more of what we are doing now. Wishes are often like the above. Granting a wish will surely […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Government-hired contractors are like grandparents in that they will give you anything you want. Here is a request to government employees to be adults and only ask for things that are practical and will be used. I’ve worked in government acquisition since 1980. For 25+ years, I was on the government side […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Technical projects have plenty of opportunities to misunderstand what someone else is doing. Help yourself. If something is different, give it a different name. This is a post about a part of configuration management. But don’t stop reading yet. This makes sense and is not painful. Things change in technical projects. Software […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips One of my personal heuristics about projects is that on a good project, all the challenges come from technology and all the joys come from people. Bad project are the other way around. A year or so ago I found myself in a conversation with a woman who was starting a technology […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I often saw companies blamed for bad management. The real problem was estimating in time of greatest ignorance and customers not mitigating the risk of such estimates. For a couple of decades, I monitored the performance of companies on government contracts. Part of this job was to grade the companies on how […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Smart and caring people do stupid things. I do stupid things. I advocate going out and finding these stupid things. Knowing they exist helps to prevent and plan for them. There is a lot of stupid out there in the world. Otherwise smart and caring people doing things that are just plain […]

[Read more →]