We are back with a great episode. Ross and I talk to Courtney Kissler and Jason Josephy about Nordstrom’s Continuous Improvements practices. We touch on ideas such as DevOps and Mainframes, Lean principles, the envelope game, and incremental vs disruptive change.

Download MP3 – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS

Links from the show:

• PDCA was mentioned a few times but not defined. Here’s a link to what PDCA is for those unfamiliar with the term.
• Kata Five Coaching Questions
• Envelope Game
• The Innovator’s Dilemma
• Goats in Berkeley

Guest Info:

Courtney Kissler – @ladyhock – Courtney has been with Nordstrom since 2002, when she joined the company as a security engineer. By 2004, she had moved into a leadership role supporting the direct operations team, and went on to additional leadership positions in infrastructure/operations, supporting the integration competency center, corporate center delivery teams, and e-commerce program management. In 2012, Courtney assumed her current role supporting program management, delivery, and support for the store and digital technology teams, and continuous improvement program. Courtney graduated with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Eastern Washington University. Post graduation, Courtney worked for two startup companies, CyberSafe and WorldStream Communications, in helpdesk, sysadmin, and networking positions.

Jason Josephy – @jjosephy – I have been working in software for the last 18 years. While still attending the University of Washington, where I was studying Computer Science, I started doing web development building web pages and light weight ASP applications. right after college I joined Microsoft where I stayed for 16 years. While there I was exposed to many different Software Engineering Methodologies, primarily agile, and worked on a number of Products and Services from Web to Desktop and built a broad base of experience across stacks. In 2005, I began my evolution with agile, receiving my certification as a Scrum Master and went on to run and facilitate a number of agile Teams. My passions are in Services and Distributed Systems as well as Mathematics.

I have lived in the Pacific Northwest my entire life, growing up in Idaho and moving to Seattle in 1993 where I have been ever since. I love the outdoors and really enjoy skiing and fly fishing. Most of my time these days is spent with my two young boys Aven and Micah who are 4 and 2 respectively.