Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Systems engineering consumes resources. It isn’t “real engineering.” It, however, is usually necessary. Systems engineering—one part of it—enables us to record what everything is and what everything does. But we already know that, duh! Or do we? Consider an organization with three or 33 software systems. What does #1 do? #2?…#33? How […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Would anyone mind if we simply did this correctly? There are some fields of endeavor where the problem has been solved. The solution is known and many have employed the solution successfully many times. I know we don’t usually do this type of thing here, but would anyone mind if we did? […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes—make that almost all the time—the path from the problem to the solution is winding. “We had a problem; we solved it. Let me describe how we found and implemented the solution.”—a satisfied problem solver. Ah, nothing more satisfied than a problem solver just after solving a problem. Listen carefully. They will […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Will the solution solve anything? Will the solution make the situation worse? “Let’s fix that!”—the cry of the optimistic solution-er. Will the solution improve our situation or only make it worse? A long-time colleague once described a situation he faced decades ago. Things at home were a mess. His wife and kids […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Change can be a nuisance—even change that leads to “better” things. Stuck in traffic. Hate it. And I have to stay further behind some annoying vehicles for fear of having a rock crack my windshield. Dump trucks. Everywhere I drove this week there were dump trucks. Up and down the roads. They […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Some persons use items to abuse others. This has been occurring since, well since a long time. Is there an answer? I found this to be an interesting article on tech’s guilt in how some persons abuse other persons. Should all Microsoft employees feel guilty because the name-your-worst-bad-person uses Word and Outlook? […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Customers don’t want long—or any—explanations. Simply tell the customer how we will make the situation right. Another month, another bad experience with customer service. The details are not important. I paid for a service, the provider made a mess of things, I heard dozens of reasons why the situation went wrong. I […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips In many cases it is a bad idea to have the problem solver in the room when a problem describer describes a problem for the first time. About a generation ago, there was a movie about engineers and scientists at work in a small tech company. A couple of consultants arrive and […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Question: Why don’t we address this situation? And I suggest one solution. Note the clever use of the summary as question and the title as answer. Maybe that isn’t so clever, but I find the actual question and accompanying answer common. I was recently reading about how engineers and computer programmers might […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Let’s twist the meta-problem and meta-solution a bit to help reveal the underlying problem. It happened again this week… I wanted a software tool installed on my computer at work. Now the computer at work is on a network. We can’t just go installing software on networked computers willy nilly. We have […]

[Read more →]