Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Recent events bring an old saying to mind: you don’t need permission to do your job. You don’t need permission to do your job1 This thought hit me last week. I was working in a different office and was struggling to get anything done. One of the things that bothered me was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yet another example of someone not eating their own dog food. My wife and I went “out of town” for a day for our anniversary this weekend. We ate dinner in Front Royal, Virginia. We like that town. We ate at a local restaurant – locally owned and operated. It was a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Computers are cheap. The people required to buy and install them at a company are not. Maybe it is time to treat the computer at work like we treat office supplies such as pens and paper. The title is correct. Computers are too darn cheap. Desktop machines are $500 and less. Laptops […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I find that there are three levels of knowing something. (1) understanding (2) using (3) explaining. Take care when assuming more than we know. I know a lot of things (there are many more things that I don’t know, but that is another matter). Over the years, I have been privileged to […]

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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 Systems are built to satisfy the requirements of the user. Sometimes, engineers want to add things, i.e., they desire to add things. Such are “desire-ments,” and they can kill projects. I walked into an existing project. Well, I  wasn’t in the middle of the project, but I was to work with a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The tooth fairy does not exist. No amount of wishing, hoping, dreaming, and whatever it is that children do when a baby tooth falls from their mouth, will change that fact. Sometimes – many times – adults at work wish there is a tooth fairy and we wish we can just jump […]

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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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by Dwayne Phillips How specific should a system specification be? How many resources should the spec consume? I propose a measure to help answer these questions – the Return on Specification Investment. A few years ago, I was reviewing a specification for a system that someone in the office had written. I came to one […]

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