Agile Development Blog

I’m excited! Next week is shaping up to be something of an epic little timebox for me: 3 keynotes in 3 different cities in 3 days. I love it! Sustainable pace? Well, maybe not every week. But next week has me fired up. I’ve got a definition of Done Done Done that has me flying high.

Here is what’s on the agenda for my 3-day extravaganza:

April 5th finds me in Chicago, an old haunt of mine.

I’ll be part of one of my favorite events with Rally and its partners: “Agile Comes to You”. The keynote? “12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes.” I’ll be talking about negative patterns for Agile adoptions. Yes, I know there are more than 12 ways to ensure an Agile adoption fails. But I only have 30 minutes to speak :-) Heading back to Chicago, I look forward to making new friends and meeting up with old friends, especially one of our panelists, Brendan Flynn of PointRoll. I’m eager to find out what Chi-town is up to with the move of Agile onto “main street” (or is that the Magnificent Mile?) Want to join us? Sign-up here, come say hello at the Chicago Marriott Downtown, and share some of your experiences and queries.

April 6th I hop over the border to one of my favorite Canadian cities, Toronto, Ontario.

Here again, I’ll have the honor of bringing my keynote perspectives on how Agile adoptions fail. I’m eager to learn with attendees what they have seen in this great city and the surrounding technology area about their Agile adoptions. And, I look forward to our discussions on how we can truly succeed in adopting Agile for great, sustainable business value. If you are in Toronto on the 6th, join us in this “Agile Comes to You” event at the Toronto Grand Hotel and Suites by signing up here.

April 7th I return home to Denver, the “Mile High City.”

And yes there is another event in store. I’m very honored to have been invited to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural “Mile High Agile” event. This is going to be a particularly special event for me. My colleagues Rachel Weston and Zach Nies will be co-presenting on “Using Agile Principles to Solve Tough Problems in Your Business.” Rally as a Platinum Sponsor is investing in our great Agile community in the Denver area. The air may be thin up here but the interest in Agile is deep and passionate. We are extremely fortunate to have a group of wonderful, hard-working organizers from the Agile Denver group: Brad Swanson, Somnath Ghosh, Walter den Haan, Tom Smallwood, Eric Cussen, Jim Turosak, Jan Beaver, and Jon Archer. Brad has worked with me to engage in one of my favorite topics for the keynote, “Elevating the Agile Community of Thinkers.” This talk affords me the opportunity to continue to share my passion about community as thinkers and thinkers as community in our Agile world. To all my friends along the Front Range here in Colorado, I look forward to seeing you at The Plaza at the Denver Merchandise Mart.

Coming full circle, my “3 strange days” will move through Agile failure modes to the great community of thinkers we gather in our Agile growth and success. As Captain Picard would say, “Warp One! Engage!

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

Bernard, our top penguin here at Rally, has been doggedly engaged in our search for a Director of HR. Feedback from our recent blog post about the search generated interesting discussion. To wit: why wasn’t Rally using this opportunity to come up with a new title for this Director position?

Epiphany moment for Bernard! Being a highly engaged Agile penguin, he became quite concerned about this very important role. Bernard realized that the traditional title just didn’t seem to fit with Rally as a truly Agile organization. Rally has been named best company to work for in Colorado. And we place #6 by Outside Magazine as one of the top 50 places to work for in the US. With the vision, culture, and values here at Rally, Bernard is now quite determined that we bring a new title to this role.

And so on Bernard’s behalf (lack of opposable thumbs limits some of Bernard’s “hands-on” work at Rally), I recently put the call out on twitter:

W00t! We received 27 responses, though I suspect some suggestions were more tongue-in-cheek than real suggestions. Nonetheless, it is clear: we have great creative people in the Agile community thinking about this role.

Here are the 27 title suggestions Bernard and I received in our search:

1. Company Capacity & Fun Facilitator
2. VP of Keeping It Real
3. Talent Facilitator
4. Chief People Advocate
5. Chief Happiness Officer
6. Head of Talent
7. Team Consistency Enforcer
8. “Sparkles” – (Okay, this person was confusing a dog-naming twitter stream with our stream)
9. Director of Human Capital
10. Director of Human Power
11. Chief People Servant
12. People Potentiator
13. Hawaiian Shirt and Jeans Facilitator
14. Director for Business Enablement through People
15. Pit Crew Leader – (a Daniel Pink reference?)
16. People & Fun Leader/Facilitator
17. Head Cat-Herder – (Bernard is unamused)
18. Kitten Cultivator and Litterbox Cleaner – (see above)
19. Director of Helping People Be More Resourceful
20. Staffing Facilitator
21. Director of the People Team
22. Employee Ombudsman
23. [certified] People Master
24. Head Employee Servant Leader
25. People Servant Leader
26. Employee Development
27. Trusted Employee Advisor

Thanks to all, and nice work. Bernard and I keep going back to Daniel Pink’s “Drive.” Because we value Pink’s guidance on autonomy, mastery, and purpose, we believe this role must embody Rally’s commitment to an Agile culture of learning and growth.

Now, what do YOU think the name of this role should be?

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

Bernard is a member of the Rally Office of the CTO and mascot for the Unreasonable Institute of Boulder CO.

It’s March Madness for college basketball here in the US. And if you know me, you know I am a nut about college hoops. Hence my metaphor for David Anderson’s recent book, “Kanban”. It is a true dream team of material and I am a true fan. 

I had been flipping through David’s book, a bit here, a bit there. And then one day, found myself completely absorbed. I am so struck by David’s expanse of knowledge, his well-founded observations, and his breadth of very accessible experience. What strikes me most though is the clarity of voice in which David offers us his depth of guidance on Kanban.

I first remember hearing David’s passion around Kanban at the Agile 2007 conference in Washington. Just a few feet away from where I was putting final touches on my systems thinking talk, here was David. In the Open Space of the conference, he collected anyone interested to listen to his passion about Kanban. I watched the small group of people grow to a larger group. For me, that was the moment I started to see David and Kanban become synonymous.

Since that 2007 conference, Kanban has become a much sought after topic by organizations looking for visualization, transparency, and continuous improvement in their processes. David’s book is a wonderful place in which to begin your Kanban immersion. Through David’s book, we learn why we should care about Kanban; how principles of flow guide our perspectives on Kanban; and what the Kanban practices are that specifically help us continuously deliver value in the larger context of our organizations.

Now, to admit my particular biases about why David’s “Kanban” is a top seed in my brackets:

• I love the “Takeaways” at the end of each chapter. Each snippet is spot on.
• I already mentioned it but the clarity of voice. It is key in how David brings us Kanban in such an accessible way.
• Everything about WIP limits. David has a “cool your jets” approach to how to set WIP limits and then watch how they help or hinder the value stream.
• “Dragos and the 25 Days.” Sound like a children’s book? Too bad. You are going to have to read David’s book to find out why Dragos and his 25 days, for me, is like an incredible 3-point fadeaway shot, all net, with one second on the clock!

I am fortunate to be in an organization that is embracing Kanban. I am fortunate to experience Kanban day-to-day as well as to bring my experiences to others. I am so fortunate I have other colleagues here at Rally passionate about Kanban. I’m very fortunate to be involved in the upcoming Lean SSC conference in Long Beach where many of us will be coming to talk about Lean and Kanban. And, I am so fortunate to have been there in 2007 for David’s talk about Kanban and to now have David’s “Kanban” book in my toolbox of Kanban goodness.

Read this book and embrace David’s advice. It will not only put you and your organization at the top of your bracket; it will keep you there.

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

With the help of a large and passionate community, Dean Leffingwell and I feel confident in answering yes to the question we posed last December, “Is Agile the key to building high assurance software?” Based on the feedback we’ve received in Dean’s Scaling Software Agility Blog and the large number of medical device companies already successfully utilizing Agile practices, it’s clear that Agile is vital to bringing highly innovative and high assurance products to market before your competitors. Here are a some of the comments we’ve received from practitioners.

“I think this is quite interesting, and quite possibly could revolutionize the way medical device software is delivered.  Life sciences is the last bastion of waterfall development methodology. I look forward to championing the cause!” - Bernie Barbour

“Having been in FDA regulated development environments for over 10 years, this truly is an area where most people live & breath waterfall. But as you said, there are a few out there already doing agile in this domain and I would argue that it can be done (relatively) easy.” – Michael Meissner

The community really stepped up to help us pave the way for developing the first guidance truly focused on the details of implementing Agile in High Assurance Environments using Medical Devices as are exemplar (see topics like: Software V&V: Verification Testing Features and The Validation Sprint Explained). Having presented the meat of the process in our first series, we are excited to move forward on a second blog series, Agile Tooling for High Assurance Software Development.

In this series, Dean and I will provide examples of tools that many of us have in our own environment, such as Rally, Quality Center, and SVN, and show how these products can be used to support the compliance documentation that is commonly produced for audits in regulated environments. We will provide the community with best practices for using Rally as well as a best of breed solution that integrates Rally to other products.

The series will include posts like…

1) Use Rally to track and report on the basics – Define | Verify | Build
2) Achieve tight traceability and reporting from Product Requirements to System Requirement to Verification & Validation
3) Don’t overlook the implementation of the Validation Sprint
4) Testing and test traceability in High Assurance Environments

In conjunction with this series, Rally will release new applications like an improved traceability matrix and a SRS report that Rally customers will be able to take advantage of. In addition, we encourage you to share your suggestions for reporting that would help to automate the compliance process for your Agile team. If you are a Rally user, please enter your ideas at Rally Ideas and tag it as “compliance.” Or, feel free to send me an email at craig@rallydev.com.

If this topic interests you please leave us a comment below, on Dean’s Blog, or send me an email.

We’re looking for a Director of HR

Rally is proud of its continued growth since our inception 8 years ago. In the last 2 years, we’ve practically doubled in size. And now we need help sustaining our pride in our company, our culture, and our people. We need a great, unique Director of HR.

Rally Looks Different

Taking its lead from Jim Collins “Good to Great”, Rally truly lives by its core values. For us, our Director of HR would be both an internal and external model and supporter of these values: Create your own reality; Respect people; Make and meet commitments; Give back to the community; Theory-driven decision making; Sustainable work-life balance.

We’re proud of our awards!

Named the Best Company to Work For in Colorado in 2009 and 2010, and ranked the #6 Best Places to Work in the nation from Outside Magazine in 2010, Rally offers a highly collaborative culture and work-life balance that attracts top talent. Our product gets plenty of accolades too, winning four consecutive Jolt Awards (the software industry’s equivalent of the Oscars®) in our category 2006-2009 and recently recognized by industry analyst Forester Research as “offering the best combination of capability and strategy of Agile ALM tools.”

Agile organizations look different

From the start, Rally has prided itself in being a truly Agile organization in the software industry. What does it mean to be a Director of HR in an Agile company? Here are a few characteristics of Agile we value:

• Servant Leadership — our management model takes a page out of the Robert Greenleaf approach to leadership: lead by serving and serve by leading. Our Director of HR must be someone who can sustain this environment, mentor others in it, and create professional development opportunities for growth in this management style.
• Self-Organizing Teams — part of being an organization of servant leaders includes a strong belief in the value of self-organizing teams. We eschew command-and-control style management. Rather, we seek insights from teams and turn to them to guide our solutions that align with our corporate vision.
• Emphasis on Teams — Rally embraces a strong culture of collaboration. For us, that means that we value team accomplishments over individualism or heroism. Our HR Director needs to help us guide employees in the value of team ownership and the intrinsic rewards therein.
• De-emphasis on hierarchy — Finally, in our Agile company, we de-emphasize traditional hierarchical organizational structures. Rally is proud of maintaining a fairly flat organization even as we grow upwards of 250 people.

Could This Be You?

So, our Director of HR may look a bit different than you might expect. Still, we are looking for some great solid HR credentials that should look very familiar to you. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you via the career section of our web site. There you will find a detailed job description and other benefit details. If this is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with your friends and with your networks using the “ShareThis” button below or through our LinkedIn post.

Tim Miller is a dropout from the University of Colorado but somehow has two degrees from CU. He keeps sane by playing golf and tennis and is the CEO at Rally Software Development.

I love games! Especially games that help teams grasp Agile principles and practices. There is nothing like a good game to help build some solid muscle memory around core aspects of how Agile impacts teams and organizations.

In the next couple of months, I have the very good fortune to be involved in several Agile game events. I’m lucky enough to try out new games, bring in some systems thinking and design thinking games, and help others apply games.

To learn more about Agile games, check out the AgileGames Google group, Agile 2011 Salt Lake City in August and Agile Games 2011 in the Boston area in April.

And watch my little video to find out what’s happening and why I am so excited!

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