Agile Development Blog

(Note: This post originally appeared at leadingresults.)

Several weeks ago, I made a pact with my Rally colleague Ken Clyne to finally begin blogging in 2011.

At the time, I expected that I’d write about agile product development – what it is to “be agile”, the relative merits of different frameworks, various tips and tricks, and basically share my experiences leading agile transformations.

After all, it’s what I do – it’s what I know.

But then I came across the great TED Talk: “The Golden Circle”, by Simon Sinek

(You can also see this video in Jean Tabaka’s recent post “Tell Me Why“).

“People don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it”…  Its amazing what happens when you start asking the right questions.

Agile isn’t the ‘Why’ – at least not for me.  Agile coaching is ‘What’ I do.  Why do I do it?  What do I believe?

First, I believe in LEADERSHIP.

Leadership tends to get a bad rap in some corners of the agile community.  After all, agile is about self-managed, empowered teams and the wisdom of the crowd.  Potential leaders are too often equated with traditional, autocratic management – slow, bureaucratic and in-humane – so they’re effectively told to ‘just stay out of the team’s way’ – and that’s unfortunate.

Truly enlightened leadership is the key to high-performing teams.  Real leadership unleashes the potential of people; transforms them into a team; inspires their passions and focuses their energies.

And I believe in RESULTS.

When we invest our time, energy and passion we expect to achieve something.  To realize meaningful results.  Results matter.  Results can mean more than making money (though it almost always includes that) – delighting customers, being first to market, and creating a great work environment may all be objectives for you, your team and your organization.  Are you achieving results?

No matter the beauty of your process or the philosophical purity of your approach; if it doesn’t yield results it’s a well executed failure.

Too often, results seem to get lost in process maturity and methodology dogma – and that’s certainly not unique to the agile community.

So…  Why Leading Results?

• Because I believe that enlightened leadership is the key to unleashing the potential of high performing teams that achieve results beyond the imagining of their individual members…

• I help unleash this potential by coaching people on how to lead effectively, from any position within the organization…

• I just happen to coach lean/agile principles and practices…

• Would you like to buy some?

Isaac Montgomery is the harried father of twin sons, the adoring husband of Angie, a frustrated hack on the golf course, and an Agile Coach at Rally Software.  He blogs at Leading Results, and you can follow him on twitter at @iwmontgomery

Starting on June 16th, I will be taking a six week sabbatical from Rally to be the Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at the Unreasonable Institute. This institute, an incubator for social ventures, was formed in 2010 in Boulder by a talented array of recent CU graduates. Watch this 2 minute trailer to understand what they did last year:

(See all the Unreasonable TV episodes from last year.)

In the past, I have mentored TechStars teams here in Boulder and loved the work. Here at Rally, I’ve led and worked on the company’s social mission, our green team and the corporate social responsibility team. I consider myself socially aware. But when I attended the Unreasonable Institute’s Global Summit event last summer in Boulder, I was blown away.   The quality of the people, their concepts, the high caliber of the program and the great video coverage really opened my eyes to the possibility of scaling these efforts fast.  The large, complex social problems this Institute’s entrepreneurs are working to solve are so very compelling to me.  I believe this EIR role is a unique opportunity for me to push my thinking by working daily for five weeks with these well-vetted social entrepreneurs.  To me, this sabbatical is about working outside the business to broaden my perspective and shape the heuristics of complex social solutions. This is not what I do in a typical week where I would simply work “on” or “in” the business.  In essence, it is my effort to continue to find ways to scale myself as Sheryl Sandberg describes in her Stanford Thought Leader’s podcast. But it is also a way for my team at Rally to grow based on my absence.

Rally’s sabbatical program is about service and “mental slack” time

As you might remember from my Thank You Sun Microsystems post, Rally created our sabbatical program based on the Sun Microsystems model with help from an ex-Sun HR director.  As the longest serving employee at Rally, I am the first proof point of our sabbatical program.  As such, I hope through my choices that Rally employees who become eligible to apply to this program after seven years of service will find a way for this unique opportunity to help them scale themselves as well.  I think of the benefits of this program as “mental slack time.”  We all need this time to sharpen our personal vision, work outside the business, and scale ourselves. In so doing, we can bring multiple forms of value, to the business and to our communities.  I think of this sabbatical work just like those three Citizenship merit badges in Boy Scouts or an Agile hack-a-thon for yourself.

At Rally this is a benefit you earn, but you have to apply for it.  Your application gets reviewed by your manager and the executive leaders for purpose and value to you, the business and society. If your sabbatical aligns with the social mission of Rally, you may even be eligible for additional funding to support your efforts from the Rally Foundation.  The criteria is not extremely hard. But we know that the process of long-term personal planning and working outside our business leads to great passion in our people and innovations for our business.

For my part, as an EIR with the Unreasonable Institute, I will be leveraging personal experiences from across my software and non-profit start-up efforts.  I already know I plan to  teach a class to the 2011 participants on business model canvases, Lean Start-ups and Agile with one of Rally’s coaches, Ben Carey.  But mostly, my eyes are wide open to helping the entrepreneurs make magic and form promising organizations.  Scaling to solve large social problems like poverty, lack of clean water, global climate change and net access are the mysteries we need to solve as we grow past 7 Billion people on the planet.

Help the Unreasonable Institute break molds

Through the Unreasonable Institute, Daniel Epstein, Teju Ravilochan and Tyler Hartung are breaking all kinds of molds. I’m proud to join them and the rest of the team this summer in their work.  Each year, twenty-five entrepreneurs are selected to attend the Institute. This year, the Institute has narrowed the field of possible attendees from 300 to 50. January 20th marked the opening of its Finalist Marketplace . In the marketplace, these 50 finalists are challenged to raise the $8,000 tuition fee in order to attend. However, they are not allowed to pay their own way! The first 25 entrepreneurs to raise the necessary fee from the Internet become the invited entrepreneurs for this 2011 session. And, you can be a part of this! Consider joining the marketplace to help select the entrepreneurs you believe deserve a chance to participate.

I hope you will consider this kind of effort for yourself and even your organization

My hope is that people strive to push themselves up the steps of social responsibility and citizenship.  Consider the model from Mark Kramer and Michael Porter at FSG (see their HBR article on Strategy and Society), in which they paint a world of three levels of corporate social responsibility:

1. Generic Social Issues - Social issues that neither are significantly impacted by the company’s operations, nor materially affect its long term competitiveness
2. Value Chain Impacts - Social issues that  are significantly impacted by the company’s activities in the ordinary course of business
3. Competitive Context – Social issues in the company’s external environment that affect the underlying drivers of competitiveness in the locations where the company operates

At Rally, we worked hard in 2010 to shape our social mission and foundation

Rally has gained a tremendous amount of direction with our corporate social responsibility work from Marc Benioff and Suzanne DiBianca in the model they formed at the Salesforce.com Foundation. And we’ve been informed by the Entrepreneur’s Foundation Corporate Citizenship Conference.  We will continue to share more of the details of this work as our Foundation finalizes.

The benefits of social responsibility work has been amazing in my life.  I’ve benefited from immediate emotional returns, wonderful ideas, amazing relationships and long-term feedback on my purpose and goals in life.  Even without a sabbatical program,  I hope you will consider some step up on the social responsibility ladder this year. One of the most unique benefits of corporate social responsibility came after my dinner to sign up for the EIR opportunity, I got a 3′ penguin (the mascot of Unreasonable Institute).  If the penguin has anything to say about it, it’s going to be a great summer!

A simple answer to the title of this post – NO this is not Unreasonable slack time! It is some of the best work you can do for yourself, your business, your community and society.  Don’t forget to visit – Share the 1/1/1 Model, Entrepreneur’s Foundation, EFCO, Serve.gov or follow the Unreasonable Institute on RSS, Twitter, TV.

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

Time for another installation in our “One Hit Wonder Friday” series! Today, I am thinking about work I’ve been doing in the many layers we apply in Agile planning. I’ve been trying to bring some of that to light in our “N-Levels of Planning” series. Working with my colleague Greg Frazer, some thoughts about what we mean by levels and planning have emerged.

Agile planning isn’t just one way

Greg and I have this notion that in truly Agile contexts, planning occurs not just top down (from the organization’s vision to the team’s committed velocity) and not just bottom up (from the team commitments and velocity to the product release). We also have a sense that plans at one level inform its immediate neighbors up and down as well as side to side. Think of a portfolio situation where the plans for different initiatives impact the plans of others. Each plan level and each parallel plan is informed by its neighbors. That makes the plan more organically useful over time. But, to be clear, this does not suggest high dependency of plans; any given plan also has a sense of autonomy. It holds itself and takes in information and radiates information as is useful to its overall commitment. That commitment, it turns out, is tremendously valuable to the “n-levels” around it.

Agile planning isn’t just planning

Greg and I are working with a group here at Rally called the “N-Level Rock.” Our small but mighty team investigates not only what we’ve seen change in the world of Agile planning; we bring in what seems to have persistence.  In particular, our rock team is inviting a big sense of planning. It stretches beyond the team, beyond a product line and into the real business of the organization. It’s a big world! And, it is NOT just about planning in that big world. It’s about steering in that big world. That is, bring trust and check and guidance into your planning world.

Agile planning is big and small

Back to N-levels. Yes, there is a sense of hierarchy in this nomenclature. More importantly, think about a symmetry of attributes around very large horizons into release horizons, iteration horizons and then daily horizons. In a continuous flow environment, you still have a long term horizon; it simply is informed by continuous flow of value evaluated and updated in each daily plan. When we embrace up and down Agile planning, planning as steering, and planning as both big and small, we avoid the pitfalls of traditional planning, We avoid that feeling of, “Another promise fallen through, another season passes by you.”

And now to our “One Hit Wonder Friday!”

Well, I’ve laid in a few clues about our band this Friday. (Thanks again to Wikipedia for feeding my one hit wonder trivia passion.) A small band singing their heart out about big things. BTW, my colleague Greg in the picture above is from Canada, roughly 3,850,000 square miles in size. THAT is a big country! But I digress. Back to our one hit wonder. While they were a fairly successful band in the UK, they managed to muster only one hit on the US charts. Our small but mighty band from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland took a stance in 1983 about what it means to live with big dreams and yet hold them close, to not let them be shattered or to be expected to grow flowers in the desert. Tony, Bruce, Stuart and Mark are still active today with something of a cult following. But some of us will never think of them in any other way as “Big Country”: a small group from the great country of Scotland (square miles: roughly 30,400) who believed in greatness on many levels. With that said, today I offer you “In a Big Country.”

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

(This post is the third in our series Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level)

Where are you in your Agile adoption? Are you celebrating your Agile successes?  Have Agile practices and discipline helped you address challenges with quality, delivery, and customer satisfaction? Are your Agile teams–and even multi-team programs–delivering high-quality, valuable features reliably?  Do both your team and program leadership effectively promote learning and value-delivery?

Our new Rally service offering

If so, congratulations!  You are now ready for the next step in your Agile transformation: Agile planning at a more strategic level.  We call this Agile Strategic Planning. Rally now offers this new service wherein we partner with you in this next step in your transformation. Let us help you bring Agile thinking to your portfolio roadmapping and other strategic planning cycles through this new Agile Strategic Planning service.

In Agile Strategic Planning, we align development work to the business’s goals, outcomes and strategies. We still support detailed decision-making at the team level, the people closest to the work. And we continue to explicitly help teams start learning sooner. However, in Agile Strategic Planning, we do this by establishing business cooperation and a cadence of feedback loops at a higher level that enable you to help and steer strategically as needed. The result over time is that work remains aligned to key strategic goals and remains focused on value.

Agile Strategic Planning has different challenges and different disciplines

While you may be ready for this strategic next step in your Agile transformation, your challenges are not over. You’ll know you are faltering if you experience the following:

• Long executive planning cycles drive big up-front planning
• Executive commitments do not benefit from course corrections during the year
• Portfolio Management or Product Management is still driving to plans with both date and scope fixed
• Other departments–like Marketing, Ops, Release Management –struggle to align their activities to the rapid deliveries of development
• The annual resourcing cycles that drive up-front planning also reduce agility in execution

Good Agile Strategic Planning embraces Agile thinking and discipline practices such as:

• Rolling-wave planning, in which we recognize that we have more confidence in the short-term and less confidence in the long-term
• Improving focus and throughput by limiting work-in-progress, funding fewer initiatives in a cycle, and potentially making initiatives smaller to reduce risk
• Establishing new feedback loops, such as higher-level regular inspect-and-adapt cycles and new information radiators
• Placing an emphasis on defining outcomes, rather than outputs, and on clearly defining value propositions and clear costs of delay for initiatives

Our Rally service starts with your context not prescription

Agile practices at this strategic level are far less prescriptive than at the team level.  As a result, we apply strategic principles to your specific context that then guide the practices that can achieve your strategic planning goals. Rally’s Agile Strategic Planning service starts with a Rally Agile Coach or Coaches spending time understanding your context: the current state of your Agile development practices and organization; your current strategic planning cycles; what challenges you’re experiencing; and, what goals you seek to attain by moving to Agile Strategic Planning.

Building from this initial assessment, Rally coaches facilitate your leadership team in applying Agile techniques to what becomes your Strategic Roadmap. We emphasize deciding on the right investments across the portfolio at the business level to get the right value from your development organization.

Next, Rally coaches work with you to define fundamental feedback loops that guide how you refine your Strategic Roadmap. Jointly, we help you develop a cadence for what we refer to as a “rolling roadmap” that continually sets a responsive and value-based strategy.

Our request: Be our co-creator

Rally is excited to bring this service to our customers.  Be one of our forefront customers, our partner, who helps us fill in more detail about this service while improving your own strategic planning.  We have built this Agile Strategic Planning service from our past experience working with enterprise Agile customers.  And now, we’re ready to put the pieces together into this single service.  Here is our invitation: help us create a great, whole offering that successfully brings Agile to the Enterprise level.

Our offer: Receive a special Rally partnership

Rally is eager to partner with early customers on this service. We are prepared to invest more with these first customers who help us help them.  As a result of your readiness to partner and co-create, you can expect more time, effort and Rally coaches for your money. Be our partner as we take Agile to the Strategic Planning level in your organization. Work with Rally and be prepared to celebrate your Agile success at a whole new level.

Ronica Roth is Rally’s Solutions Evangelist, an Agile Coach, a CST, a skier, and a Steelers fan.