Working Up

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

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Bias in AI or Just Another Bad Idea?

February 18th, 2021 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Once again, someone creates all sorts of fancy explanations for what was simply a bad idea poorly conducted. There seems to be a lot of “bias” in the machine learning area of artificial intelligence research and practice. Or can we explain the problems without using such fancy terms like “bias?” What were […]

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Tags: Analysis · General Systems Thinking · Management · Problems · Process · Science · Systems

Does It Matter How We Do Things?

January 21st, 2021 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips All organizations have management processes. Do they matter? All organizations have management processes. Some organizations codify them, teach them, spread them, proclaim them, and even sometimes use them. Do things management processes, i.e., “the way we do things around here,” matter? Of course they do. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the personnel, […]

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Tags: Management · Process · Stories · Success

The Blank Sheet of Paper Test

October 22nd, 2020 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Everyone claims agreement. Great. Let’s just test that statement with a blank sheet of paper. “We all agree on what we are to do!” claimed a person full of hope and anxious to get to work. “Wow, great,” said a second person who likes to hear good news, but is skeptical when […]

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Tags: Agreement · Alternatives · Failure · Meetings · Process

One of the Ultimate Compliments at Work

January 30th, 2020 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips One of the ultimate compliments at work is, “We’ll do fine without you.” If you want to be indispensable, do a really bad job. It may seem backwards, but we can do without our best employees. Of course, this all depends on the definition we use for “best” and “good.” Our best […]

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Tags: Process · Respect · Trust · Work

Prosperity Vehicles

August 23rd, 2018 · No Comments

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 […]

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Tags: Change · Problems · Process

Assessment

July 26th, 2018 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips When assessing a system, remember the correct order of tasks, and always remember that persons are involved in any system that matters. When assessing a system, proceed to: Observe Learn Converse Please, do these tasks in this order. This is especially recommended when persons are part of that system, and persons are […]

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Tags: Analysis · Process

Expanding the AI Problem Set

September 5th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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Tags: Adapting · General Systems Thinking · Learning · Problems · Process

Solution Collapse

May 5th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips If we work hard enough and smart enough to the solution, we often find the solution collapses to something small and simple. At the end of all the work, we find the solution. The solution is messy, but it is a solution. Then we go home. Then we come back to work […]

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Tags: Problems · Process · Systems

Preparation

March 28th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Probably the best preparation is to be prepared to be unprepared. I prepare. I plan. I am ready. I drive some people nuts with these habits. Somewhere along the line I learned that I was never prepared for everything. Hence, I became prepared for that, too. I learned to be prepared to […]

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Tags: Adapting · Authentic · Process · Reaction

The Most Important Five Minutes of My Day

December 3rd, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Five minutes of quiet thought. Each morning, at the end of Internet viewing and blogging and before I “go to work,” I sit for five quiet minutes and drink coffee. I stare into space. I am not wasting time. It is an investment, one of the sharpening-the-saw moments from a self-help best-selling […]

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Tags: Breathe · Clarity · Meetings · Process