Agile Development Blog

I’ve been pretty passionate about collaboration and knowledge flow throughout the decades of my technical life. This passion led me to author Collaboration Explained. Now I value playing with and applying a variety of visioning, planning, and learning models in Agile organizations. My reading has focused on models for individuals and organizations in how they create flow of value in 21st century businesses. For me, there could be no better place than the Agile context in which to apply these models of rich knowledge sharing. Complex Agile organizations need to consider diverse models that can effectively guide how they plan and deliver.

Agile planning helps us scale and mature across the organization

With this in mind, I’m excited to announce a new series about N levels of Agile planning. I’ll be co-authoring the series with my Rally colleagues Ben Carey, Zach Nies and other Rally folks. Ben, Zach and I want to share some of our informal conversations around Enterprise Agile planning, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. That means we’ll be blogging about various models we think can be useful for capturing and tracking Agile business value up and down the organization.  Our suspicion is that useful scaling and maturing models coupled with overall team practices bring great value at a variety of levels within an Enterprise Agile organization.

In this series, we’ll share direct experience in applying our models both within Rally and with Rally customers. That means we’ll share some insights about collections of practices at the various levels of Agile planning. We’ll also provide guidance around the Rally services and tooling we believe support planning in continuously innovative, value-driven organizations. Also, be sure to check out Ryan Martens’s series about Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. Ryan and others will be providing on-going guidance about Rally’s “Project Stratus” tool for road mapping and other strategic practices specifically for Enterprise Agile beyond Release planning.

Ben, Zach and I don’t believe we are the sole experts on this topic!

We’re exposing our frank conversations in hopes of gaining your reactions, insights and feedback. You probably already know about some of Rally’s existing guidance on Agile planning. We just want to dig a little deeper, play a little more with these perspectives and some new approaches that could help you innovate your own Enterprise Agile adoption. While we do this, we’ll be reporting on how we are experimenting with these models here at Rally in our own practices using our own tools and our own services as well as new practices.

Look for our first blog in the next few days describing the overall model of  “Why, How, and What” in positioning the value of Enterprise Agile planning. How many levels of planning will emerge in our exploration, and what will they look like? We aren’t yet prepared to declare in a definitive fashion. Instead, we’ll peek into that together with your input.

Join us as we go into N levels of Agile planning and beyond. We’re looking forward to great dialogue with you through the comments you bring.

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Congratulations to the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute on their recent 2 year birthday and on a very successful quarter including a $92,000 Technical Assistance Grant from the Community Development Financial Institution Fund (CDFI). That grant and others will assist in building their capacity and efforts toward being certified as a CDFI. The CDFI focuses on enabling ”financial institutions to provide credit, capital, and financial services to underserved populations and communities in the United States.”

Rally is proud to be a 2010 partner with RMMFI as part of our ’1%Fund’ program which encourages employees to spend 1% of their paid time volunteering. In 2009 this program led to the contribution of over 2,300 volunteer hours. As part of an effort to increase our skill-based volunteering during 2010, Rally recently collaborated with RMMFI on a non-profit Salesforce.com Foundation implementation of Salesforce.com.

Rally’s Matt Harutun from customer support led this initiative after learning about the RMMFI team’s desire to integrate Salesforce.com into their business. Matt’s reflections on this partnership underscore the value of shared vision and continuous collaboration in creating a successful outcome.

I started the project, having enough knowledge of the Salesforce.com to be dangerous. I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to partner with RMMFI and help them deploy Salesforce.com successfully in their organization. There were many keys to making this venture successful, one of the key drivers, though, was having a shared vision of the world made that made for an easy introductory conversation.

A quick glance at RMMFI’s site tells you three things: the team is focused on learning, lending and coaching. Right away, we saw two areas of shared vision: learning and coaching.  Part of what I love and enjoy about Rally is our commitment to being thought leaders in our space as well as challenging ourselves with new and innovative ideas.  This translated well to RMMFI’s goal of teaching their clients about transforming dreams into a business plan. Similarly, both groups valued learning which provided both parties the ability to teach one another and also share and adapt ideas. During our project kickoff, we were fortunate to have the talented Rachel Weston, Rally’s Director of Services, facilitate this meeting. The RMMFI team was so enamored with the way she facilitated the kickoff that they took more notes on the Scrum process than the actual project! The RMMFI team takes a systems based approach to helping their clients improve their businesses – akin to what our Professional Services team does when they are engaged – drive client success through business transformation.

Another interesting outcome was RMMFI’s willingness to adopt Agile principles into their business. Not only were flip charts and Post-It notes a fun way to collaborate, but using key Agile principles like constantly prioritizing the team’s backlog and teaching their clients to focus on the highest priority items in their businesses helped increase visibility into the work being done and also opened new avenues for knowledge transfer. As a shameless plug, the project was run in an Agile fashion which was a very effective way to get RMMFI’s data model up and running quickly.  

Finally, the team was also fortunate to have Rally’s own Salesforce.com Administrator, Rich McGuire, volunteer some of his time to guide the team through the Salesforce.com cloud. His expertise at the keyboard and affable personality quickly made him a team favorite. All this combined with his leadership in the local Salesforce.com User Group, we were able to continue the development effort by leveraging the development community at large who were also excited about the opportunity to pitch in.

At the outset of any projects, there are countless roadblocks, impediments and challenges that can derail any effort. Having good team chemistry through similar beliefs, actions and values – while not a surefire recipe for success – certainly helps pave the road to success.

Find a partner:

Finally, you should know this project involved partnership with other firms to get this done. Aptly nicknamed Michael “S’ Force, from Salesforce.com in Denver, has been a critical resource to help RMMFI all the way to the finish line. In addition, the folks from Application Experts, other Salesforce.com partners and members of the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado are moving in to help RMMFI operate, scale and maintain the Salesforce solution beyond launch. You know, it really does take a community to make these things work. Thank you everyone for your help.

The partnership with RMMFI is a great example of Rally’s move toward skill-based volunteering as part of our larger social mission that includes the forming Rally Foundation and our recent certification as a B Corporation. As an Entrepreneur Foundation company in Colorado, we use many of the resources available from the Entrepreneur’s Foundation to help us build a great corporate social responsibility program. In addition, the folks at Intersector Partners, were invaluable in helping us set-up a great working relationship with this young and amazingly effective non-profit.

Have you thought about your own social mission and the steps you’re taking to move that mission forward? One great way to build momentum is to seek out partnerships that provide opportunities and rewards for all involved. We are reaping those rewards in skills development, recruiting great folks and building intrinsic motivations through working towards a purpose. 2010 has been a stepping stone year and we are now primed for another big step in 2011.

Is corporate social responsibility something you care about? How are you making this a strategic part of your business?

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, Executive Director for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and CTO at Rally Software Development.

I am excited to say that this week we announced, at the Gartner AADI Summit and Agile Development Practices East, the availability of a new service offering and product from Rally. To support this launch and amplify the feedback loops from the community, we are starting a blog series on this topic. All of the blog posts in this series will show up in the blog, but also get linked into a summary page focused on Scaling Agile to the Strategic level (above release level, including roadmap and vision level for products, programs and solutions).

If managing Agile at the strategic level is something you are expert at or struggling with, you will want to follow this series. It is going to be written by a team of folks from Rally including myself, Jean, two internal Coaches at Rally, eighteen external Coaches at Rally and product experts.

In the last year, we have read a ton on strategic execution and lean, blogged on many of those ideas, experimented with talks and exercises and worked with a number of our customers. In addition, we ran our fellow Rallyers through many of these concepts. As a result of this work and the rapid development of our supporting product, code-named “Project Stratus,” we feel that we are ready to offer some value in the form of professional, product and community services to educate, enable and explore these concepts, methods and tools with our customers.

From sharing our experiences, we have learned that managing above the release level, at the roadmap and vision level, is different than project or program-level management. It is NOT:

• as focused on the big epic feature as the desired outcome
• an extension of the integrated agile release train as much as management of flow and contention

These offerings are brand new; we know they will change with more feedback and experience; as a result, they are being released now with less packaging and polish. The service offering starts with a two-day assessment and training effort, but then moves into a custom statement of work. The Project Stratus product offering will remain in preview status for the short term. We assume that focused work with 15 to 20 key customers will shape these solutions for all.

If you think you could be one of those customers, please do not hesitate to contact your account managers, coaches or customer success representatives. We are anxious to share these breakthrough concepts with customers who are willing to co-develop them with us.

With regard to the blog series, we see the following topics getting explored over the next three months:

• Introduction
• Our Theories and Why Project Stratus?
• Our Agile Strategic Planning Service offering
• The making of Project Stratus
• Prediction in Kanban versus Scrum commitment
• Enterprise Kanban and AgileZen
• Others, based on your comments and feedback

If you have topic ideas or comments, please post below. Again, don’t forget to subscribe or share the RSS feed or email feed for the blog to be part of this discussion. We want YOU to participate in this Community of Thinkers!

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Rally’s ongoing use of hackathons to spur innovation and creativity are highlighted in a new article on Inc., “How to Set Up a Hackathon.” Our own Todd Sheridan, Scrum Master, and Chris Browne, Agile Coach, contributed terrific insights into the benefits, rules and how to best setup successful hackathons. One of the key takeaways from the article is recognizing that hackathon thinking “shouldn’t only extend to product ideas, but to how the company operates internally.” Taking time to step away from everyday issues provides valuable distance that can help stimulate creative thinking.

Hackathons, a time-boxed event used to build prototypes of innovations, are a popular way to spur new ideas and have been employed by companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago we shared Rally’s experience hosting week long culture and space “hackathons” as part of our effort to extend these innovative events beyond their traditional engineering and development contexts. We had an awesome hackathon week, applying the fundamental ideas of urgency and innovation to our own company culture while producing four great projects.

Do you use hackathons in your organization? We’d love to hear about how you’re hacking your products, spaces and culture.

Ryan Martens is a tomatillo salsa maker, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

It’s shaping up to be a busy November for us here at Rally with conferences on both coasts. We’re a Silver sponsor of Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration (AADI) Summit November 15-17 in Los Angeles. For Agile Development Practices (ADP) East November 14-19 in Orlando, Rally is the Conference Sponsor and once again I’m honored to be presenting. We’re coast to coast, and we’ve got discount codes for both conferences (see below).

Rally on the West coast with AADI

Rally is excited to be a part of Gartner’s AADI Summit that focuses on powering the Agile enterprise. The summit includes a key conference track on Agile and highlights three critical building blocks of a successful applications strategy—Cloud, SOA and the overhaul of existing Applications. Stop by the Rally booth to talk with one of our Agile coaches or other team members to learn how we can help move your organization into the next phase of Agile adoption.

In addition, one of Rally’s high-profile, enterprise customers will be speaking about how their adoption of Agile practices in an 800-person development organization (within a $15 billion division) has delivered:

• 3X better throughput
• an 89% bug reduction
• the elimination of over 180,000 hours of development time in one quarter

For more news and information about the summit, follow the #GartnerAADI hashtag on Twitter. Also, stop by the Rally booth (F) to pick up a hat, register for a chance to win an iPad, and to learn more about how we can partner with you in achieving Agile success.

Rally on the East coast with ADP East

Once again, Rally is proud to be the Conference Sponsor for ADP East. This conference is a great opportunity to dive into both Agile basics and the latest trends in Agile. Participants will gain guidance in testing, development and organizational best practices.

I always love the ADP conferences because of the energy of the participants and the variety of topics. The conference is a great venue in which to share new ideas and experiences. This year I’m excited about exploring new trends in Kanban as well as revisiting Agile basics such as story writing.

Be sure to check out my two sessions on Monday and Wednesday along with these other opportunities to join with us at the conference:

• Monday, 11/15 at 8:30 am – Writing Great User Stories 1/2 day tutorial
• Tuesday, 11/16 at 4:30 pm - Welcome Reception, sponsored by Rally
• Wednesday, 11/17 at 12:45 pm – Lean, Kanban and the Art of Flow regular session with Bill Wake, Senior Coach at Industrial Logic, Inc.
• Wednesday, 11/17 at 2:45 pm – Agile with the Right Tools can Maximize Developer Productivity with Collin O’Brien, Technical Account Manager and Sean Billow, Major Account Manager at Rally Software
• Visit the Rally Software booth # 7 & 8 to chat with Agile coaches and other Rally team members about how we partner with organizations through tools, coaching and community to help achieve Agile success. Rally is also contributing an iPad to the conference Passport game, so be sure to stop by to get your passport stamp.

For more information and updates about the event, follow the #ADP10 conference hashtag on Twitter.

If you’d like to join us for either of these events, use the following registration links and discount codes: Gartner AADI use code ADRD to save $300; ADP use code RAAV to save $200

Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka