Podcast: Building Organizational Capability

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 420 features an interview with me, by Thomas Cagley, on Building Organizational Capability (download podcast).

John Hunter in the podcast:

Changing how organizations are managed makes a huge difference in people’s lives, not all the time and I understand most of the time it doesn’t. But when this is done well people can go from dreading going to work to enjoying going to work, not every single day – but most days, and it can change our lives so that most of the time we are doing things that we find valuable and we enjoy instead of just going to work to get a paycheck so we can enjoy the hours that we have away from work.

John Hunter, Zion National Park, Utah, USA

Here are some links where I go into more detail on some of the topics I discuss in the podcast:

• Strategy Based on Capability and Integrated with Execution – Building the Capability for Management Improvement in Your Organization
• Actionable Metrics – Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data – Understanding Data – Outcome and In-Process Measures – Fooled by Randomness (understanding variation) – Data Can’t Lie (but we can be mislead)
• Building a Great Software Development Team
• Expanding Your Circle of Influence (personal constancy of purpose, transformation) – What to Do To Create a Continual Improvement Culture
• Customer Focus with a Deming Perspective – User/Customer Gemba – Delighting Customers – The importance of customer focus – ask customers what 1 thing could we do better
• Leadership and Management – The Importance of Leadership by Those Working to Improve Management – Leadership While Viewing the Organization as a System – Executive Leadership

Thomas Cagley: If you have the power to change any 2 things that affect decision making what would they be and why?

John Hunter:

First that results are evaluated. Make decisions then evaluate what actually happens based upon what you do. Learn from that, improve how you make future decisions and keep iterating.

That idea of evaluating what actually happens is extremely powerful and will reinforce going in the right direction because if you evaluate most decisions many organizations make nothing got any better. And after doing that many times you can learn this isn’t working, we need to do something better.

And the second would be more prioritization. Make fewer decisions but take more time to make those decisions, implement those decisions, evaluate those decisions, learn from those results and iterate again.

I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Related: Software Process and Measurement Podcast With John Hunter on my book Management Matters – Deming and Software Development