The Free-Form Data Entry Template
by Dwayne Phillips How to cross the barrier of the blank sheet of paper. I love a blank sheet of paper. I know a lot of people who don’t. I was in a meeting once where people were given blank sheets of...
View ArticleIf It’s Different…
by Dwayne Phillips Technical projects have plenty of opportunities to misunderstand what someone else is doing. Help yourself. If something is different, give it a different name. This is a post about...
View ArticleContemplative Writing
by Dwayne Phillips Contemplative writing is a valuable practice. It is far more valuable and far less used than shallow meetings. In my 28 years working for the government, I attended countless...
View ArticleProblem and Process: Four Cases
by Dwayne Phillips There is the thing we are attempting and the way we are attempting it. Using this perspective, there are four cases to consider. Wrong Thing – Wrong Way: Here we chose the wrong...
View ArticleDon’t Let Agile Slow You Down
by Dwayne Phillips It seems that everyone is using an Agile process these days. There really isn’t anything new in Agile. And, in some cases, Agile can slow the delivery of software to users. What?...
View ArticleThey Made Us Do That in College
by Dwayne Phillips There are practices that time has proven to be worthwhile. Someone in school drilled them into us. We vowed to avoid them as soon as school was out, but life eventually catches us. I...
View ArticleThe Purpose
by Dwayne Phillips People often choose a development method without any reason other than, “that is what everyone is doing now.” I urge a bit more thought. More thought on day one brings more time and...
View ArticleThe Zero-th Step of Any Process
by Dwayne Phillips Before doing anything else—think. Yes, this is old advice, but it still works. Process, process, process. The world uses Agile processes now. (At least those people whose job it is...
View ArticleDon’t Try so Hard
by Dwayne Phillips I try hard at everything. Sometimes I try hard too much. <start advice> Slow down. Back away. Breathe. Drink a cup of coffee. Relax. Take a nap. Find your own little zen thing...
View ArticleOn the Critical Path
by Dwayne Phillips If you are on the critical path of a project, you often behave in ways that don’t seem to make sense. The critical path of a project means a lot of things to different people....
View ArticleThe Most Important Five Minutes of My Day
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....
View ArticlePreparation
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...
View ArticleSolution Collapse
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...
View ArticleExpanding the AI Problem Set
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...
View ArticleAssessment
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...
View ArticleProsperity Vehicles
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...
View ArticleOne of the Ultimate Compliments at Work
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...
View ArticleThe Blank Sheet of Paper Test
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...
View ArticleDoes It Matter How We Do Things?
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...
View ArticleBias in AI or Just Another Bad Idea?
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...
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