Agile Development Blog

October and November for me are going to be months of travel. Specifically travel in Europe. I’m excited about the opportunity to bring my passions in and around the world of Agile to some great conferences in London, Aarhus, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Malmo. So, I offer this video as view into where I’ll be, when I’ll be there, and what I’ll be talking about. As you’ll hear me say in the video, I hope to see you there!

For more information on the conferences:

Agile Business Conference, London UK

GOTO Conference, Aarhus Denmark

Oredev, Malmo, Sweden

Jean Tabaka is a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

Last week, Zach and I enjoyed the incredible opportunity of engaging in a video interview with Geoffrey Moore on his new book, Escape Velocity.  First things first, for those of you who didn’t attend live, the archived webinar and slides are now available.

The book really hit home for me because, at its core, its really all about steering the Agile business. It provides both the new portfolio models and the specific stories for executives, as well as Product and Development teams to escape the “pull” of the past successes and set yourself up for the next success.  Specifically for development teams making the transition to a more Agile execution model, Geoffrey describes ways to work the budget/portfolio process to invest in the further development of the companies crown jewels.  With this kind of strategic investment, you can work to create your unmatchable offer power that wins customer market while increasing company power necessary to become a top tier play in your category. Geoffrey really connected the topics from the book with his perspective on the value of Agile development:

“Agile puts you in the problem state with the end user, live in that problem state and drive backwards on how to get there.  If there is an opportunity for a breakthrough, you will find it before anyone else does.” – Geoffrey Moore

Take the next step
I highly recommend buying the book, if you haven’t already.  In addition to standard e-book, hardcover and audible versions of the book, Geoffrey has released a real innovations for his new and 20 year fans. With Escape Velocity, he created an enhanced ebook on Amazon with embedded videos and an enhanced ebook for the Ipad/Ibook with links back into past books and models. There is now one source for everything Moore!
Geoffrey’s book has specific strategies for transforming vision and strategy.  These strategies should be easier for Agile teams that can support fast learning. If  however you are looking to first transform execution power to enable your escape velocity, don’t miss some of our great content to support your Agile adoption:

• If you currently use Agile at the team or multi-team level or are brand-new to these concepts, share one of our online Agile toolkits with your team:
  • Iteration Planning Toolkit
  • User Stories Toolkit
  • Multi-team Release Planning Toolkit
  • Project Managers Toolkit
• If you want more education in this webinar format, sign up for our ongoing Agile Webinar Series. Our next topic is Agile in High Assurance Environments, led by author and methodologist Dean Leffingwell and our own Craig Langenfeld.
• If you want to make the case for Agile development in your organization and learn why it’s becoming the norm, get the Forrester report on Agile development trends and tools.

Please let us know what you thought of the webinar by commenting on this post.

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

Thousands of Rally Subscription administrators received the following email today. It is about a major upgrade in our community, support, help and training infrastructure. I am sending it our blog readers because I assume you may be very interested in these changes at Rally. I am also trying to open another channel for feedback regarding this email. While this email was targeted to our subscription administrators, I wanted to give you a channel to express your support or concern with us emailing you these kind of major service announcements. We did this because it is a set of changes that will affect all your users. Would you like us to continue doing this?  Should we expand the list to all Rally users?  Your feedback would be invaluable.

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From the time you begin using Rally’s Agile lifecycle management solutions, you have access to a wide range of resources to ensure you get the most out of Rally and to get the most impact from Agile methods and practices. In keeping with this core value, Rally is upgrading our online Help, Training, Support and Community sites to provide more features, content and searchability. You may have already noticed these sites evolving over the last few weeks. Our goal is to roll out these changes incrementally and thoughtfully so that you experience new functionality and content, not broken links. If we missed something along the way, please let us know.

What’s in it for you?

• Our new Support Knowledge Base brings you how-to’s, best practices and FAQs on specific Rally actions and processes.
• More robust Help greatly improves the accessibility and searchability across Rally support resources. Check out the new task-driven menu structure, quick links to our most popular content, and articles from our coaches.
• Single source of connectors, apps and support materials lets you search and find a connector or app, install it and read support documentation in one single location.
• Coming Soon! You’ll get another email at the end of the month outlining additional resources, including a new Support Portal that will provide quicker access to information you need on a daily basis.

Quick links:

• Search the Rally knowledgebase for FAQs: http://support.rallydev.com/kb
• Browse Help topics: http://www.rallydev.com/help/
• Browse Rally’s catalog apps: http://www.rallydev.com/help/use_apps
• Learn about the latest Rally features: http://www.rallydev.com/productblog/
• Submit a support case: http://www.rallydev.com/support/support_case/
• Vote and interact with Rally’s Product team: http://ideas.rallydev.com/

This structural transition should complete by the end of September, and you will receive one more announcement to provide you the full set of links. We plan to make further enhancements to this new community platform and properties, while we reposition Agile Commons to become a do-it-yourself Agile resource site for more than Rally Customers. We are excited for you to be a part of this transition. Please feel free to send your suggestions to community@rallydev.com.

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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.

In summer, the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series at Stanford released their video podcast with Geoffrey Moore on his new book “Escape Velocity” As soon as we saw it, I contacted Geoffrey to see if I could get an early copy of the book. Geoffrey was very happy to share and subsequently talk to me about how Rally could help promote this great new book and web site, Escape Velocity, which launches today.

I highly recommend the book, buy it today, and see the video. As you can see from my collections of his books, I love his work. His command of English and simple models always makes reading his books a real pleasure. I got “Crossing the Chasm,” when I was in school as an engineer back in the 1980′s.  I enjoyed working with him and The Chasm Group back in 2000 while I was at BEA. But, now this newest book has hit while Rally is working with customers that struggle with escaping the “pull” of the past. As Geoffrey describes, this is “A better vocabulary to talk about power versus performance.” I see many customers describing why they invest in Rally – to transform their execution and offer power.

As a result, this book is not just interesting for product management, but for the executives in engineering, marketing and sales, as well as the whole executive team. Because my team was so excited about this book, we were able to get our marketing team excited too. I am thrilled to announce that Zach and I will be interview Geoffrey live on September 22nd. Please consider joining us for this webinar.

Now to helping us make this interview work for you. Zach and I are going to run this interview based on our understanding of this book and our experiences, but we are also very interested in your questions. We will support chat and Twitter during the webinar, but your comments on this post would be even more appreciated. Here are some of the our draft questions:

• Most Agile development teams have fixed the execution power level – what is next and why?
• I have read all your books – can you reflect on this book in relationship to past works? Is the really the capstone?
• For a recent graduated from college, what order would you have him read your books?
• Do you assume engineering needs to be Agile to pull off this approach?
• You mention it’s important to separate differentiation, neutralization and optimization efforts, why?

What is top of mind on this topic for you?

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.

Zach Nies is the co-CTO at Rally Software and passionate about building successful software products and a proud member of the Boulder/Denver Agile community for the last ten years. You can follow him on Twitter @ZachNies.