Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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A Job for One

October 19th, 2015 · No Comments

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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Tags: Choose · Fear · Management · Meetings · People · Work

Warmware

July 23rd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips A little-publicized factor in the computing world is that to understand something, you have to find someone, i.e., a warm body. Back in the dark ages of computing, I wrote software in a language called FORTRAN. We used FORTRAN code that had been written the pre-dark ages by a group of people […]

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Tags: Communication · Engineering · People · Programming

More Eyeballs

June 29th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips The ever decreasing cost of technology enables more people to look at more of our problems. There is hope. Linus’ Law is disputed as to what it is and who said it and who published it and all those things that come with a quote that is often quoted and misquoted. I’ll […]

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Tags: People · Problems · Technology

Technocentrism

June 22nd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I post a piece I wrote 20 years ago on a nagging attribute many of us science and engineering types possess. It happened again the other day at work. Members of my technical group were discussing the possible movement of people within our organization. We all agreed that we did not want […]

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Tags: Culture · People · Technology

Proudly Inefficient

June 8th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, we just plain do things that are inefficient by choice for the better. Sometimes we are going to do some things where we don’t care about scaling to gain efficiency. Sometimes we won’t video record the talk to play it later to millions of persons. Sometimes we are going to spend […]

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Tags: Authentic · Choose · Integrity · People · Scale

Adults Wouldn’t Do That! Right? Seriously?

May 25th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Many of my big, but slow-to-learn, learnings in life occurred because I didn’t think adults would act like that. It was the early 1980s. A senior manager said, “Whats his name works for another-government-agency. Everyone who works for that-government-agency is stupid. Therefore, whats his name is stupid.” I couldn’t believe that an […]

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Tags: Adapting · Learning · People

Is Everyone in Mississippi this Nice?

May 7th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Recent experiences show me that the nicest people in the world are in Mississippi. During the past month I spent more time in Mississippi than I ever have before. The time was stressful as we were moving my mother from her home to an assisted living facility. Did I mention that the […]

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Tags: People

Can’t versus Don’t Want To

April 6th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips A recent experience with a customer-service organization illustrates how much of today’s “can’t” is merely “I don’t want to.” The topic of this blog is nothing new. That is one of my frustrations as this is an old habit that I wish and wish had gone away in today’s world of inter-networked […]

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Tags: Expectations · Life · People

It is the People, not the Technology

March 23rd, 2015 · No Comments

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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Tags: Management · People · Technology · Thinking

People-Augmented Applications

February 26th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Every now and then we remember that we can allow a person to help another person and that we have the technology to enable that. Be My Eyes is a combined application and service that helps sight-impaired people see things clearly. The impaired person points their smartphone at a thing and is […]

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Tags: Communication · Consulting · Ideas · People