Working Up

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 […]

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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  […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Small projects are great for new engineers. The new engineers learn so many different aspects of building a system on a small project. I used to think that; I no longer do. Instead, I think that small or smaller projects carry with them a curse that can ruin an engineer or programmer […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I  obtain the PMI’s Project Management Professional certification. It seemed that every request for proposal that we received from the government wanted the same thing: a certified project manager.  It didn’t matter that a person, like me, had years of experience, three degrees, and had written several books on project management (like […]

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