{"id":1415,"date":"2013-06-06T01:12:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T06:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2013-05-23T11:41:48","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T16:41:48","slug":"the-one-year-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2013\/06\/the-one-year-rule\/","title":{"rendered":"The One-Year Rule"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>Before putting your work on a computer, do it by pencil and paper for a year.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I developed this guideline about 20 years ago. I kept seeing people spending lots of money (million$) creating databases and such to help them do their work.\u00a0 Most of the work was simple, like:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We have several thousand items in this room. People check out items. We need to know where any item is at any time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>A Solution<\/strong>: put a person at the door with a clipboard, piece of paper, and a pencil. If needed, put a mean dog next to the person.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Another Solution<\/strong>: spend a million dollars buying a big computer, a database system, and hiring a couple of database programmers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>People chose Another Solution. Go$h.<\/p>\n<p>And if that wasn&#8217;t bad enough, they were spending taxpayers&#8217; dollars.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from wasting money, the result was a system that didn&#8217;t help people accomplish their work. They tried the computerized system &#8211; for a little while. They stopped using it after a couple of weeks because it didn&#8217;t do what they wanted.<\/p>\n<p>They didn&#8217;t understand their work. They had not done it long enough to understand it.<\/p>\n<p>So, here is the part where I dispense the sage advice:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do your work with a pencil and paper for a year (see Note)<\/li>\n<li>Tear up the results<\/li>\n<li>Try it again<\/li>\n<li>Be frustrated<\/li>\n<li>Smash your head against the wall<\/li>\n<li>Now you are ready to speak with a systems analyst who may be able to help you with a computer system that improves your work<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Note<\/strong>: Don&#8217;t take &#8220;a year&#8221; literally. Maybe six months, maybe two years, whatever is appropriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips Before putting your work on a computer, do it by pencil and paper for a year. I developed this guideline about 20 years ago. I kept seeing people spending lots of money (million$) creating databases and such to help them do their work.\u00a0 Most of the work was simple, like: We have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,67],"tags":[178,187],"class_list":["post-1415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-systems","category-work","tag-systems","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}