Working Up

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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by Dwayne Phillips Avoid asking an engineer or some other non-writer to write a complete first draft of a document. The result will be bad, but the non-writer will love it more than himself. There are few anguishes known to man as that experienced when a manager tells an engineer or some other professional who […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems that the most difficult thing for a decision maker to say is “no.” Here are a few stories of efforts that were wasted because when given the opportunity, people could not bring themselves to say “no.” There is something difficult about saying “no.” I don’t quite understand it. Perhaps my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips. There are a lot of standards today guiding our behavior. There seem to be a lot of people today who ignore the standards and yet they succeed. It is illegal in many places to talk on a cell phone while driving. It is illegal in many places to send text messages while […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some 25 years ago, I learned something that has stayed with me. The reason it has stayed with me is that it still holds true: Don’t depend on live demos. The title of this post is a statement made often by one of my advisors in graduate school way back at LSU […]

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