Oct 28, 2026 · 39 min · 10 segments
New INCOSE Podcast episode alert! In the latest installment of the official INCOSE Podcast, we sit down with expert consultant, speaker, and award-winning author Alan Willett (\*Leading the…
Samantha BernalHost
So with all of your experience with Xerox and after that, you moved to the software engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon university.
What did all of your experience teach you about the idea that the way an organization works can be engineered and improve?
So, um, Aerox was really fantastic in a lot of ways, but there were programs, of course, that had some problems.
And culture leads to behavior, and culture can lead to bad results or good results.
One of the anti-example of, and then how it led me to actually working on actually developing the more deeper leadership issues, which is how do you actually stand up and do good work even in a culture that's challenging you? The culture I was in had this saying, hurry up and get it to test so we can start finding the defects.
they did their work and faster they got it to test, the more defects testing found.
Yeah.
That was getting in there at 7 in the morning, staying off until 11 at night, coming in Saturday, coming in Sunday.
And when I look back at it, I realize we had over 80% cost of quality, 80% time really wasted to rework.
If you think about it that way, this was a very large project, like a thousand people all together.
We would have delivered years earlier with a lot less expense and made a lot more money.
So with all of your experience with Xerox and after that, you moved to the software engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon university.
What did all of your experience teach you about the idea that the way an organization works can be engineered and improve?
So, um, Aerox was really fantastic in a lot of ways, but there were programs, of course, that had some problems.
And culture leads to behavior, and culture can lead to bad results or good results.
One of the anti-example of, and then how it led me to actually working on actually developing the more deeper leadership issues, which is how do you actually stand up and do good work even in a culture that's challenging you? The culture I was in had this saying, hurry up and get it to test so we can start finding the defects.
they did their work and faster they got it to test, the more defects testing found.
Yeah.
That was getting in there at 7 in the morning, staying off until 11 at night, coming in Saturday, coming in Sunday.
And when I look back at it, I realize we had over 80% cost of quality, 80% time really wasted to rework.
If you think about it that way, this was a very large project, like a thousand people all together.
We would have delivered years earlier with a lot less expense and made a lot more money.
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