Steve Tendon Interviewed on the Software Process and Measurement Cast

Steve Tendon has been interviewed by Tom Cagley, the host of the popular SPaM Cast (Software Process and Measurement Cast).

Tom asked the following questions to Steve (approximate minutes into the talk are given in parenthesis):

What […] is hyper-productivity? (05:05)

If hyper-productivity is generated by unpredictable or unseen links, how can we use this concept to actually impact how we do work? (08:10)

How do you convince people that it isn’t as simple as following a recipe? (11:30)

How do you define that word (productivity) in terms of how you would measure it? (14:18)

Do you find that it is difficult to help organizations to get to that point? (19:40)

You recently published a new book ‘Tame the Flow’, a new book about hyper productivity, productive knowledge-work management with Wolfram Muller. In the description of the book you talk about extrapolating software engineering learning to general knowledge, work management. […] How would it be that taking something that is relatively specific, we then make it then generally useful? (22:08)

It is interesting that you bring up the Yahoo example because I would suggest that in software and software related industries we started the trend to distribute work and to abandon face to face, so is it that we have recognized that the experiment is less effective for hyper-productivity or productivity in general, and now we are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, and bring back the people together so that we can create the knowledge? (26:30)

We are back to the whole difference between each organization, each organization’s culture means that the solution that they will embrace to become hyper-productive is going to be different? (29:32)

Do you find that there is a strong message that organizations don’t typically want to hear. Obviously if they don’t want to hear they don’t even get there; but that suggest that this is a hard thing for most CEOs, CIOs, CFOs to actually hear that they are on the way? (32:10)

Steve, if you woke up tomorrow morning someone handed you a cup of coffee and a magic wand and said that you had the power to change any two things effecting organizational productivity and their path to hyper productivity what would those two things be and why? (35:18)