Agile Development Blog

Welcome back to my series on Rally’s process for annual planning.

In the first post of this 4-part series about our planning, I offered you a glimpse into how we conducted some of the initial planning Iteration approach: from executive visioning through departmental ORIDs into deep preparation for the Iteration 3: the planning meeting. We chose to act as chefs in our approach versus follow a recipe.

Our annual planning has iterations

To reset the stage a bit, let me give a high-level view of our overall planning approach. Think about 5 iterations (not levels, iterations) of planning. We kicked off the annual planning through an executive offsite as our Iteration 1. The outcome of this iteration was a set of proposed Mother Strategies. (To learn about our use of Mother Strategies, checkout Part 1 of this series.) This was followed by Iteration 2: departmental ORIDs. I then touched into the preparation we asked of participants, our customer guests and our team of three facilitators for the 2-day meeting of annual planning, Iteration 3. Iterations 4 and 5 wrapped up the overall planning for the year by setting our cadence for continuous steering throughout the company.

Time for the planning meeting sessions to begin!

As the actual annual planning meeting approached, we stepped up the details of the facilitation processes that would guide the two days of planning. This Iteration 3 of planning included pre-reading as part of the iteration: Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore. Moore’s book about applying Horizons 1,2, and 3 in order to “free your company’s future from the pull of the past,” set the stage for all participants in the 2-day planning event. We drew upon Moore’s advice as a guide for our language and our very purposeful intentions for the year and beyond.

Build it and they will come–inviting guests to our “dinner”

It is this Iteration 3 event to which we invited our customer guests. Wow! We had never invited observers to our annual planning before. But we knew we wanted customers to see how we work, gather their feedback, and hopefully give them takeaways for their own agile organization planning. In morning sessions on the two days, we engaged over 60 Rally employees representing their teams. They were guided by 2 main facilitators and 2 assistant facilitators. For these large sessions, the facilitators prepared several weeks in advance to ensure the room provided guidance for all aspects of the meeting. In particular, we posted the purpose and a very detailed agenda. This helped everyone in the room understand the work at hand.

Afternoon sessions had a smaller gathering and concentrated on what had been learned and discussed in the morning sessions. The sessions were guided by 2 different facilitators. The 25 people in the afternoon represented the extended management team. Our guests were also present as observers. Yes, they saw and heard everything!

In the first morning, the executive team provided a review of their work on proposed Mother Strategies. The larger group of Rally employees created:

• 23 departmental readouts captured on a large wall chart created in the morning
• surprises, risks, dependencies, and recommendations brainstormed and captured in an affinity grouping chart about all the readouts
• votes from all 60 attendees with regard to their reactions to the 5 Mother Strategy proposals that had emerged from the executive offsite

Mother Strategies–trust and safety in the 60-person voting step

We felt strongly about protecting each attendees anonymity as they evaluated the Mother Strategies. as defined in Pascal Dennis’s book “Getting the Right Things Done.” You can also checkout more in Part 1 of this series.) We wanted people to be able to make tough recommendations about the Mother Strategies without influence from others. Trust and safety were critical for the voting to be truly candid. Our anonymous voting system used colored cards and baskets. Each of the five proposed Mother Strategies had a basket into which people placed one of three possible colored cards:

• Green card = “We need this Mother Strategy this year.”
• Yellow card = “I don’t care whether we do this Mother Strategy or not.”
• Red card = “We should not have this as a Mother Strategy for this year.”

Everyone voted on every strategy. They were also invited to write comments on the green/yellow/red small cards to explain why they had chosen a particular color.

During lunch, the team of facilitators counted all the cards for each Mother Strategy. We then used a bar chart to reveal: how many green vs yellow vs red cards each Mother Strategy received. And, we glued some of the cards with comments to a wall chart to show insights from the group. We wanted to provide feedback in both a quantitative and qualitative way.

Always close with a retrospective

Before the morning session was completely over, the facilitators team made sure the group could provide feedback on the meeting. Participants populated a mood chart about each part of the morning’s agenda in the following way: were you glad we had the agenda item; did it not really impact you one way or another; or, were you disappointed in it (it added no value)? This too was captured on a large wall chart. It was completely visible for everyone to see, including our guests.

What do we do with this information?

In the afternoon of the first day, we switched our facilitators and used new processes: a Kanban board of agenda items versus a list of agenda topics. The group of 25, along with our 12 guest observers, had a lot to absorb. Our first step was to quickly build a bridge of empathy about the morning participants and their work. To do this, we turned to Empathy Maps, an approach to learning we’d practiced with people from the Stanford d.school. We also followed guidance from the book Gamestorming. Teams of 4-6 people (including our guests) gathered at separate wall charts to brainstorm about the morning. What did we notice about the 60 participants? What had the 60 people from the various departments heard, said, seen, done, thought and felt during the morning session?  The readout, in particular from our guest observers, revealed a great deal about how people were engaged; what they were concerned about; what they valued; what gave them energy; how open were they, and, what they might have taken away from the meeting.

We also re-visited the morning group’s insights and risks as well as the voting on the proposed Mother Strategies looking at the bar charts and comments. This was revelatory. We discovered some strong opinions we didn’t expect. The main revelation? How do these five proposed Mother Strategies help the entire company focus for the year? How do they help the company determine what to stop doing, start doing, and keep doing? In sum, the group of 60 sought assurances and clarity about how to do their steering through the year.

Wrapping up Day 1 of Iteration 3

Our first day of Iteration 3 started to wrap up after open dialogue around the proposed Mother strategies. Each of the 25 participants self-selected which strategies invited their focus. These sub-groups provided more detail around the strategy, outlined initial metrics, and created a 4-minute”stump” speech using a Bert Decker grid for crystallizing their messaging. The results were both stunning and energizing. We were ready to bring our work into the morning session of day 2. We ended the day by holding a retrospective on the overall day and by asking our guest observers to give us their feedback through their own ORID exercise.

Ask a guest customer to tell you about how you are doing. You’ll truly love the experience. Once again, their attention to detail, their observation of trends and their recommendations (for themselves and for us) made us so grateful for their presence.

Dinner and drinks sealed the deal at the day. So, ending this Part 1 of my series on “Guess Who’s Coming to Planning,” I’ll play off of the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” a bit more explicitly. We fed liberally off each other’s insights. We challenged one another. We didn’t hold back. And, we held close to our sense of being a growing, learning community.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of our 4 part series on Rally’s annual planning journey. In Part 3, we’ll finish day 2 of Iteration 3. Part 4 will complete our series by wrapping up with Iterations 4 and 5.

Jean Tabaka is a serial collaborator, a relentless facilitator, a well-intended blogger, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. If you don’t see her in your town, you can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

“Can’t we just add more people to this project and ship sooner?” Many of us in the industry know this doesn’t tend to work very well. Back in the ’70s, in “The Mythical Man Month,” Fred Brooks coined a law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

At Rally, I think we’ve figured out how to cheat this law.

Back in October, we had a market event looming. Rally was planning to launch our new Portfolio Management solution in December, and our marketing group was lining up speakers like Geoffrey Moore to help launch the product in multiple live events around the world.

Our development team, meanwhile, had a prioritized backlog of enhancements and were delivering steadily, but based on the throughput, it was clear that we wouldn’t deliver all of the features that we wanted to include in the launch.

Meanwhile, our marketing team, in their typical thorough effectiveness, added Eric Ries to the lineup at the launch event. The scale of the event was increasing, and with it the pressure to deliver something amazing.

So we got together product and engineering leadership and decided to swarm on this project. Three other teams put their current projects on hold and pulled in enhancements from the Portfolio Management backlog.

We quadrupled the team size in just a couple of days — exactly the opposite of what Brooks’s law seems to recommend.

The process wasn’t seamless, and for the first week or so there was spirited scope negotiation as the teams tried to understand their new features. But over the next seven weeks, the new teams helped deliver awesome new features that dramatically changed the scope of the release.

So why did this work?

I see five key things we did to help us cheat the law:

1. We started with an Agile team with low WIP.
In Brooks’s day, a late project often had a lot of half-completed features that all needed to be finished. In our case, the team already had working software and knew they would deliver something by the date. We just wanted more scope. How many half-finished features do you have kicking around?

2. We started with an Agile codebase.
Brooks writes a lot about the cost of bringing new team members up to speed. We’ve got high test coverage and it’s relatively easy to make changes to the system with confidence, so we didn’t have to spend much time. A few 1-hour presentations were enough to quickly enable the new teams. How learnable is your codebase?

3. We had high task independence.
For the most part, teams were able to work on features with few manageable dependencies. The majority of tasks could be completed without negotiating across teams. We got this from having a feature-oriented backlog. Is your backlog full of technical tasks or user stories?

4. We had a lightweight coordination system in place.
The four teams did need to coordinate on basic services. We created a 10-minute cross-team daily standup meeting to handle just these issues, in between our regular daily standup meetings. Can you gather representatives of multiple teams together every day?

5. We practice radical collocation.
We work in a flexible, open office layout where three teams were right next to each other and the fourth is within Nerf gun range. Any cross-team questions during the day are quickly answered. We do a lot of pair programming, so it’s easy for one member of a pair to handle interruptions without breaking the flow of the pair. Does your physical environment support rapid communication?

Bear in mind that Brooks himself admits that the law is a vast oversimplification. I imagine he might approve of this approach.

How about your organization? Are you set up to cheat Brooks’s Law? Can you apply burst capacity to your projects to deliver more value faster? What changes would you need to make to your organization to make this possible?

In Sunday’s Denver Post, Rally is celebrated as the Top Midsize Employer in Colorado. And, as if this exciting news weren’t enough, our CEO and my business partner for the last 20 years, Tim Miller, is also honored as a Top Leader in the state. He is one of only three executives selected from almost 200 local companies considered.  Of course, this is not much news for me:)

The results of The Denver Post’s 2012 Top Workplaces are based on surveys completed by over 25,000 local employees, highlighting local organizations that strive for excellence in their workplaces. The surveys asked employees to score employers on a variety of measures, including appreciation of workers, direction, confidence in leadership, values and ethics, encouragement of ideas, competence of management, and pay and benefits.

We got to see the open-ended comments from Rally’s surveys.  Here is a sample of some of the comments that really caught my eye:

• “I get to create my reality every day.”
• “I work with a great group of people that are enthusiastic and positive about what they do. We play and work together.”
• “I work in an engaging, challenging and enabling environment, where we are trusted to make and meet commitments. It is extremely satisfying being a part of Rally’s growth.”
• “My voice is heard and valued”
• “I have room for personal growth and development. It gives me the work/life balance that I need to enjoy my workweek.”

Tim Miller and I met in graduate business school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As I mentioned above, we’ve worked together for over 20 years. Rally is the third company we’ve started together. His leadership skills are an asset with immeasurable value.  He plays the critical role of integrator on our management team.  Watch highlights from The Denver Post’s ‘Top Leaders’ Roundtable discussion to hear Tim’s thought about building a successful organization and motivating employees:

Winning the Denver Post’s “Top Workplaces 2012″ award comes at a serendipitous time – Rally turns 10 years old this month! We’re bringing together customers, partners and employees to celebrate our 10th Anniversary at our Annual RallyON Conference. At RallyON, which is taking place April 30 – May 2, 2012 at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder, we’ll explore techniques for advancing Lean and Agile principles from development execution to enterprise strategy.

It’s not too late to attend RallyON! We have a limited number of slots available, so if you’re a Rally customer, partner and champion, register online today.

It’s been an amazing ride to grow Rally from a small Boulder startup in 2002 to the snowball ride downhill that it is today. I’m thrilled to celebrate our 10th anniversary and 2012 Top Workplaces win with the Rally community at the Boulder Theater and the Rally Open House. I want to send a big thank you out to everyone who has helped us learn and improve along the way.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. You can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn.

Craig Langenfeld, Rally international technical account manager, traveled from Australia to India to attend the inaugural Agile India event. He shares his experience.

Agile India!

Rally has enjoyed partnering with many Indian teams throughout the years, so I was thrilled to be a part of the first Agile India conference.  After spending time with my Indian counterparts, it’s clear that Agile is critical to changing the way software teams work together in India.  It was impressive to see that this inaugural conference was sold out with over 700 attendees from 21 countries present.  It is no wonder that India is one of the great software engineering nations of the world.

Challenging the Status Quo in Healthcare and Aerospace

I was excited to see a full house attend my presentation, Practicing Agile in Regulated Environments, on the Enterprise Agile stage on the last day of the conference.  The topic was one that surfaced several times throughout the conference, so I was thrilled to share my knowledge and provide a platform for a community discussion of practices.  The highlight of the presentation was a cameo appearance from Matt Anderson, Director of Program Management at Cerner Healthcare, who shared his experience with Agile and the FDA.  The audience contributed throughout the session, proving to me that the Indian Agile community is challenging status quo by implementing Agile in complex environments like Healthcare and Aerospace.        

Venturing Outside the Conference and into the Community

It was important to me to not just show up and solely represent Rally at the conference, but to also understand the Indian culture and see what we can do to impact the Agile community internationally.  My interest brought me in contact with two organizations:

• National Association for the Blind (NAB)  
  NAB offers programs that range from teaching the blind life skills that allow them to live independently, to teaching advanced computer courses and placing individuals at companies like Cisco and Intel.  All of their services are completely free to the people they serve.  Learn more and donate here.
• Freeset
  This fair trade business offers employment and empowerment to women. John Sinclair told the Freeset story during a very emotional keynote presentation that received a standing ovation.  Rally was honored to partner with Freeset in order to provide the conference bags to attendees.

I was lucky enough to get to work with software teams who are building better practices around the globe.  Speaking of which, India was a stop on my recent quest to circumvent the world in less than a month. I don’t think it was a record, but it sure was fun!

Craig Lagenfeld is a Technical Account Manager at Rally Software Development.

As part of the ongoing Agile Portfolio Management Series, Rally held an event in London on Friday, 30 March. Minutes from the Liverpool Street tube station, about 100 business, product and project managers met at the Andaz Hotel to discuss how to bridge the gap between development execution and business strategy. We not only had an impressive line-up of speakers, including Gartner Research Director David Norton, it was obvious that the attendees were passionate about enabling an iterative, flexible and pragmatic approach to aligning their organization’s development teams and their portfolio of projects.

The Reality of Enterprise-Class Agile

Featured Gartner Analyst David Norton kicked off the event with a thought-provoking keynote, “The Reality of Enterprise-Class Agile,” that endorsed aligning business and IT to achieve the highest return for businesses demanding greater application agility and capability. Norton recommended creating feedback loops between development leaders and those who manage project investments so they can collaboratively decide the best course of action for addressing new competitive threats or capitalizing on new market opportunities.

One of my favorite quotes from David’s talk: “If you don’t have a very reactive and responsive portfolio practice, you won’t succeed with Agile.”  He asserted that Enterprise-Class Agile Development is not just project-level Agile practices scaled up, rather it’s about optimizing the entire lifecycle, along with balancing and prioritizing projects based on risk vs. benefit.

Norton advocated implementing Agile practices and Lean principles that are repeatable, predictable and measurable. He concluded with these key points:

• The trend is for more business-centric methods based on continuous delivery. Waterfall won’t do.
• Have a clear Agile adoption strategy with defined key KPI.
• Agile and Lean practices can be adopted gradually.
• Lean principles and practices apply to all IT functions.
• Agility requires the business and IT organizations to work together.
• The IT organization needs to find the balance between formality and agility.
• At its heart, Agile is about people and requires incentivized change.

Breaking down the Wall Between Strategy & Execution

The benefits of Agile are clear – things are built faster, cheaper, and with higher quality. But, you’re only as Agile as your entire process, not just your development teams. In today’s fiercely competitive markets, businesses must integrate Agile and Lean practices into their portfolio management practices to ensure they are building the right things. I see three warning signs that your strategy is disconnected from your execution:

• Not understanding why. Watch this video from Simon Sinek on starting with “why.” He discusses how great leaders and great organizations inspire action and are able to repeat their success over and over by knowing and communicating “why” they exist.
• Water-Scrum-Fall.  Development teams using Scrum for their process are wrapped in heavyweight traditional approaches to planning and release management.
• Building things that aren’t used — According to the Standish Group Study*, 64% of features/functions in a typical system are rarely or never used. (*as reported by Jim Johnson at XP2002)

David Norton and I chatted about the disconnect between application managers and project portfolio managers, and a host of other Agile-related topics during a lively Q&A session at the London Forum. Here are some highlights:

At the end of last year, we introduced Rally Portfolio Manager, the industry’s first Agile Portfolio Management solution, to provide business leaders with unprecedented visibility into the high-level status of Agile development work. By providing fact-based governance, it empowers business leaders to make informed trade-off decisions and confidently steer their organizations in the most profitable direction. It also highlights resource bottlenecks in your idea-to-delivery value stream and offers real-time program timelines so you can clearly visualize dependencies and adjust to maintain delivery commitments of key strategic goals.

Stay tuned for more news about how Rally Portfolio Manager will continue to provide the necessary feedback loops between business and development at the Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit on 21 – 23 of May, where Rally will be a Silver sponsor.

Our goal is to continue to offer on-demand Agile educational resources and a community of your peers to share Agile software development and portfolio management questions and solutions. Up next:  Join us on 2 May, 2012 for the next event in our Agile Portfolio Management Series – “PMI-ACP: Adopting Agile into the PMP World.”

Todd Olson is VP of Product at Rally Software. He is a marathon runner and cake baker. Find Todd on Twitter at @tolson.

Thanks in large part to Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, Tim is one of the executives invited to attend the signing of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act at 2:00 Eastern today at the White House. The bill is intended to boost economic growth by simplifying the IPO process for emerging growth companies. And the IPO on-ramp provisions are particularly relevant to emerging growth companies like Rally. If you want to follow along today with the signing, the White House will have a good feed of the event.

Just look for the guy in the Hawaiian shirt

Tim’s already been quoted in a TechCrunch article this morning, and we hope to get some photos later today so stay tuned to @rallysoftware on Twitter.

For those of you who know Tim well, you know that he would rather send all 300 of our employees to the event to celebrate their success. Congratulations, Tim, and thank you for representing us in D.C.!

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. You can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn.

Recently, some great folks from one of our prized customers joined us for our two days of Rally Annual Planning.This was exciting for us. We had never before invited customers into our annual planning. Choosing to bring these customers into our Boulder offices felt as though we were creating a new paradigm for how to plan effectively. That is, for our company and for our customers, we chose to create a community of transparent planning. Little did we know what an incredible impact it would have on all of us.

In this first of a three-part series of posts, I offer you a glimpse into how we set ourselves up for our annual planning this year in a very new way: throw out the traditional cookbook and “lean into” some untested waters with no recipes. Inviting customers as our guests was one part of our experiment. How we set ourselves up before, during and after their visit invited us to act as chefs not recipe followers in other ways as well.

Through this series, I invite you to learn how we worked in “the kitchen”, what we “fed” ourselves and our guests, and what they “fed” us in return. An unbelievable 5-course feast for how we set our Rally year in motion.

Throwing out the cookboook and acting like chefs

To set the stage a bit, let me give you a high-level view of the overall annual planning approach we formulated. Think about 5 iterations (not levels, iterations) of planning. In our chef metaphor, you can think about ways we acted as chefs be inviting a learning mode to our planning. We pulled a little from this recipe, updated other recipes, and then created brand new “dishes.” Anything was possible. How? We have experimented with our annual planning every year, always pushing ourselves to learn new ways of how to plan and steer. The result? Readiness to try new approaches through our new hunches and previous experiments.

Iteration 1 — create a high-level vision “star” to steer by

We kicked off the annual planning through an executive offsite as our first iteration. Here, a group of 12 people reflected on the year 2011 and looked into our 2012 through several lenses. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) brainstorm led to a matrix of strengths and opportunities across weaknesses and threats in affinity groups. This wall map helped us realize where we really needed to focus: specifically 5 possible major efforts. At Rally, we call these efforts “Mother Strategies” as defined in Pascal Dennis’s book “Getting the Right Things Done.” This was an example of where we took a recipe from the past and modified it for our iterative approach this year.

In this initial iteration, we also used a draft Corporate Strategy A3 as a reference.  The A3 created a clear, conscise picture of our Performance Gaps and Targets, Reflections, and Rationale (all of this on the left side of the A3.) The Mother Strategies a la Dennis then informed the right side “This Year’s Action Plan” of our A3. These Mother Strategies created a draft of ideas to bring back to Rally for reflection. They provided a compression of what the executive group saw as critically valuable to address in our upcoming fiscal year.

Iteration 2 – From executive visioning to departmental recommendations

The second iteration of our planning took the form of departmental annual retrospectives. We used an approach called an ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional) from “The Art of Focused Conversation.” Our facilitated ORIDs invite all insights from all employees. These brainstorm gatherings in each department brought a valuable narrative about the past, present and future perspectives. From each ORID, we learned about completed work, the current work in progress, planned work, specific annual metrics and then overall mood charts for the year for the department. We were quite intentional about how we coupled the executive visioning with the department-level ORIDs. Importantly, these two perspectives fed the annual planning next steps.

Preparations for iteration 3 take time and heart

As the actual annual planning meeting approached, we stepped up our work on the overview and details of how we’d guide the two days of planning. Part of the  preparation for this third iteration of planning included yet another chef play: required pre-reading for all 60 participants as part of the iteration: Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore. Why? We knew that we were going to be applying some fundamental language both from Geoff’s book and a recent webinar with Geoff hosted by Rally. Specifically, we invited new vision and planning language around Horizon 1, Horizon 2, and Horizon 3 business. (My colleague Zach Nies’s post gives a great overview of these Horizons.)  Pre-work was essential in order to hold this shared vocabulary in our brainstorms and dialogues.

In addition to the participants’ pre-work, a group of 3 facilitators (Tamara Nation, Laura Burke and I) as well as our executive sponsor, Ryan, had our pre-work as well:

• create high-level views of the planning meeting across two days
• provide an FAQ for our 60 Rally participants about the flow of the planning and what their participation would be: what to bring, when they would bring their information forward, what topics they’d be asked to challenge and investigate together
• conduct empathy interviews with Rally participants about their hopes, their intentions around their roles, and their concerns about the planning, especially the 2-day meeting
• set expectations with our John Deere guests about their role in the 2-day meeting
• apply the overviews to steer how we created our detailed purposes, agendas, processes, roles, artifacts and timeboxes for the two days

Tamara, Laura, Ryan and I work together in this way to create an environment of clarity, safety, and information divergence. This is important. Our iteration 3 planning meeting ultimately seeks convergence on recommendations for subsequent iterations. You could say we were preparing the group to sit in the tug and pull necessary to reconcile the executive vision and departmental recommendations. Holding onto this ambiguity was important to feed our next step in planning.

Two iterations down, three to go

Stay tuned for the next installation of our annual planning series to learn more about iteration 3, the 2-day planning event of chef magic.

I’ll complete the series with a wrap up of iterations 4 and 5 where we set our annual plan in motion and the steering that began immediately thereafter.

Jean Tabaka is a crappy skier, an eclectic gluten-free chef, a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Over 100 people are registered for this year’s RallyON conference, taking place April 30 to May 2 in Boulder, Colo. All you need are your running shoes, a beer glass and sharpies. As well as your great insights, questions and challenges for your peers, Rally’s experts and thought leaders like Christopher Avery, George Kembel, Dean Leffingwell, Johanna Rothman, Alan Shalloway and Jean Tabaka.

If you are a Rally customer, partner and champion, email us at rallyon@rallydev.com to learn more about how to register. You’ll need to sign up by March 30 to take advantage of the early-bird discount, and to be eligible for the raffle to win a complimentary hotel stay (worth $650) or a VIP room upgrade (worth $100).

I look forward to sharing with you. Rally On!

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. You can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn.

The Collegiate Social Impact Initiatives (CSII) club blows me away with their passion. Completely volunteer, the small but mighty group of CU students here in Boulder has set out to support non-profits worldwide. How do I know this? The heart that keeps the club pumping is Kaesi Solomon. And Kaesi found me at Rally  through my boss Ryan Martens to see how I could help him help the club.

Some of the CSII students in our first Kanban session

My answer? Kanban. And specifically personal Kanban as described by Jim Benson. On March 13th, we’re inviting students from all all over CU to join us at the Leeds School of Business. In the 2-hour session, we’ll run some simulations and work through personal work to learn about how to be more effective and create transparency of our workflows. Want to manage your multi-tasking, or worse CPA (continuous partial attention?) Kanban can help you.

Besides learning about basic ways to manage the many tugs on our time, attendees will receive access to the Agilezen software. This visualization tool helps individuals, project teams, and clubs  stay informed of each other’s work and progress. It also helps each of us limit our work in progress, to complete work in rank order versus trying to do all things at once.

Check out the club video abou the event here.

And, you can sign up for the event via Facebook here.

See you Tuesday? I hope so!

I moved to Boulder when I was 18 to get an engineering degree and ski my butt off.  By setting gates for the CU ski team I skied Eldora for free and I got in 75 days my freshman year to nail my second goal. With a few repeated classes, I squeaked through my first goal with an civil engineering degree a minor in computer science and even ended up going back for an MBA at CU later.

I always thought I’d move to Silicon Valley to develop and product manage commercial software. I never did and never will.

See the rest of my post of my vision for Boulder’s startup community on Boulderstartups.org.

Ryan Martens is CTO and founder of Rally Software, a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute and chief promoter of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. You can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn.