Agile Development Blog

With the publishing of Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup, I can barely go a day without talking to someone about it. Eric clearly executed a lean startup on himself and this topic – by focusing on learning. Eric started much of his work a couple of years ago with his blog Startup Lessons Learned and by publicly speaking on the topic. I saw him first at Return Path, a local Rally customer, in May of 2010.  Since that time, he has continued to refine the principles and collected great stories for this book that speaks equally well to an new entrepreneur as a seasoned business professional.

The book is just a fantastic and hard-hitting summary of this approach to business, as well as a manual on how to teach entrepreneurial behaviors.  If Eric was a seasoned author, this would be a great book, but given the fact it is his first effort – it makes the book astonishing.  It debuted at #2 on New York Times Bestseller list!

If you do not know Eric or The Lean Startup model, it works by developing product/service in parallel with the customer in a market.  The method can be summarized by three words executed repeatedly; Build, Measure, Learn.  These cycles continue to help you assess whether to stay the course, pivot or stop.  The Lean Startup is a combination of applying Agile Development, and Customer Development methods, but draws on Lean, crowd sourcing/social and complexity to create a true collection of thinking and acting tools for today’s complex world.

Eric’s sub title really sums the book up well –

How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

… as these ideas and thinking apply equally as well for venture-backed tech startup, impact investing, social startups or internally funded intrapreneuring efforts.  If you read his blog, you will see he A/B tested about 20 sub-titles to come to this one. So, not only is a great sub-title, but it is one that attracts the right market.

Have you clicked on the book image to buy it yet?  No?  Let me try one more thing!

For Agile teams, programs or enterprises, the message from this book should be clear: you need to start applying customer development approaches to the front-end of your Agile efforts. You can read about Rally’s latest customer development in the Making of Project Stratus; and you can see the results of these efforts at our Agile Portfolio Management launch in December.

As part of this launch effort, Zach Nies and I have been given a great gift in the last month of continuous lean startup (more on that in later posts). Last week, I found out that Zach and I will have the opportunity to interview Eric live on February 2^nd.  If you don’t buy the book, you should at least register for the 1 hour video event.

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.

Last week, in Copenhagen, I had my first ever taste of moose. I also had my first taste of cowberries.  Both different and tasty and new to my palate. And so I suppose you could say my palate matured a little as a result. That alone could have been enough to make for an interesting week. But what do moose and cowberries have to do (if anything) with my passion around Agile transformations

Several weeks ago, I posted about my pending Agile Europe Road Tour . In that post, I mentioned that I’d be on an Agile grand tour in Europe for 6 weeks. And so here I am. The trip started in London, moved to Copenhagen Denmark, Aarhus Denmark, back to Copenhagen, and then on to Stockholm where I am right now. I’ll soon have a brief trip to Estonia, back to Sweden in Malmo, and the a final stop in London as the punctuation of the tour before heading home to Boulder.

Lucky for me, the variety of Agile conversations has been delightful everywhere. At the Agile Business Conference in London, it was wonderful to bring my “Community of Thinkers” message as a keynote. (And yes, for those of you keeping score, I delivered it barefooted :-) The keynote afforded me opportunity to once again promote my conviction about our actions as an Agile community. That is, as Agile matures and as Agile transformations are going mainstream, we must invite dialogue, inquiry and artistry in how we bring our “genius selves” to the continued healthy growth of Agile.

At the GOTO conference in Aarhus, I suspected that the very technical community gathered there wouldn’t be powerfully driven by Agile conversations. And yet, there was a full day of an Agile track. In that track I talked about Simon Sinek’s  ”The Golden Circle: Tell Me Why” with regard to Agile Adoptions. (The talk received a nice write up in Danish here.) Both in this track and in my keynote the following day, I found people clearly eager to be transformative agents in their organizations based on their Agile passions. My keynote on “Complexity Theory and Design Thinking in Agile Adoptions” helped further these discussions and even invited several people to approach me afterward to talk about how they now understood they work they really wanted to do in Agile. They agreed. Agile was more than just a set of engineering practices and more than the Scrum framework; organizational Agile and its growth are now moving beyond just a level set with IT disciplines. And it wasn’t too shabby to get to play Pong using my Smartphone, or to watch the annual Lego Mindstorm competition!

Liv, Jean, Aino, and Helene - GOTO Aarhus Denmark

Another part of my GOTO positive experience were the great people of Trifork : tireless volunteers and selfless sponsors of GOTO throughout the organization including their energetic CTO Kresten Krab Thorup. I was grateful to meet so many Trifork people, to enjoy their enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, passion and knowledge. In particular, it was such a pleasure to meet Aino Vonge Corry, Helene Simoni Thorup, Janne Jul Jensen, Liv Beswick Skov, Marlene Staunstrup Hyldborg, and Simon Hem Pedersen. Also from Trifork, Jesper Boeg was kind enough to provide me with a copy of his book on Kanban, as well as a book on Personal Effectiveness by his colleague Troels Richter. And Jasper Bjergard Arildslund sponsored me in speaking at a Copenhagen ScrumGroup gathering. Such great enthusiasm around Agile and its growth in software development communities worldwide.

But the pinnacle to date of discussions about complex challenging Agile transformations has been during my time at Rally’s Agile Open Forum in Copenhagen October 19th. Why? Because, in that day of tutorials and interactions, we engaged as a community of executives looking to bring Agile success out of the IT group. We created dialogue about the challenges organizations face when we move Agile upstream from the IT work into the business, and downstream into Agile practices for deployment and maintenance. Besides the session presenters from Rally (Ryan Martens in a surprise appearance, Karl Scotland, Wanda Marginean, and me) we were very fortunate to have the insights of Peter Holmelin of NetOp regarding his experiences in adopting Agile and creating significant organizational change.

I feel so fortunate to have engaged as a sponsor, a speaker and a participant in this event. In Copenhagen, During that one day, we concentrated on seeking the next level of maturity with regard to Agile practices  effective scaling, and organizational change. I loved it. The level of engagement and the variety of conversations were definitely different than any other Agile event I have attended in the past.

Karl Scotland - Agile Open Forum, Copenhagen Denmark

All in all, you might say that, as I have been on this tour, I see that the Agile community is primed to stretch the “knowledge discovery process” posited by David Anderson in his blog based on his application of Michael Kennedy’s work in Lean Enterprise guidance. In the discussions in London, Aarhus, Copenhagen and now Stockholm, we’ve been challenging ourselves to expand the definition of knowledge and the definition of discovery as Agile expands: when does the discovery begin, and when does it end (if ever)?

To that end, I’ve been listening to these leaders of large Agile adoptions. And I’ve heard the need to create greater understanding around the value and disciplines of Agile Portfolio Steering. (In fact, Wanda Marginean led a great afternoon session game on Enterprise Steering based on work by Rally colleagues Isaac Montgomery and Ronica Roth.)

Now I am in Stockholm. Thanks to a colleague from the LSSC community, Joakim Sunden of Spotify, I have been invited to a number of additional Agile events here. The level of discussions of Agile transformations continues to concentrate on organizational issues. I’m excited about my upcoming talk at the LESS2011 conference on Systems Perspectives in Agile Adoptions through Visioning and Learning Models.  I can’t wait to hear the participants’ experiences and challenges, to engage in all the interactions and, perhaps, to continue to expand my palate as well.

And so my Agile Europe Trip continues. As for my taste in food though, I know right now I won’t be tasting the specialty found on my dinner menu in Stockholm last week: “Långhalsar” in Swedish. Or if you prefer English: “Barnacles”. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

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

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

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.

Establishing an upfront, common understanding of “done” that suits the unique dynamics of each development project can be one of the most critical activities for Agile teams. With a consistent meaning of done, agreed to by the whole team, velocity or throughput becomes more stable – allowing your team to make and meet commitments, establish priorities and plan iterations.

We recently hosted a webinar entitled “Defining Done: Creating Velocity without Debt,” to discuss how a common definition of done lays the foundation for focusing on business value while avoiding technical debt. Although we enlisted Rally’s expert coaches to answer the hundreds of questions that pored in from over 2,200 people around the world who joined in, we wanted to spend some more time providing in-depth answers to a few of the questions we received. Below is a video with answers to some of the tough questions about the definition of done:

I also put together a presentation that goes into more depth about what your team can learn from burndown charts.

We hope these resources help you come up with a definition of done that suits your unique team and project. Have more questions? Feel free to post them in the comments section below – we’re always thrilled to continue these discussions with the Agile community.

Zach Nies is a CTO at Rally Software and a proud member of the Boulder/Denver Agile community for the last ten years.

We have all felt the pull of game play mechanics in software. You might be addicted to Angry Birds, Farmville, Foursquare or Mafia Wars? Or, maybe like me, you felt compelled to ski a couple extra runs this year thanks to the Epic Mix from Vail Associates. In either case, the achievement leveling and badging associated with the “gamification” of this software has most likely had some impact on your behavior.

Nowhere have I seen these techniques applied to software like I have experienced in StackExchange, a network of Q&A sites founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Most of my experience is with the Project Management StackExchange, but there are 51 public sites and over 50 other domains emerging. Thanks to smart work by the StackExchange team, the leveling and badging mechanics are used to pull you into an ownership position with the community. As you earn reputation points, you are granted more privileges on the site. This progressive enablement of editing, voting, chatting and commenting capabilities seems perfectly matched with my gaining experience of the culture and ethics of the site. The more I use the site, the more I find myself developing a real sense of ownership and responsibility to the community. This is simply beautiful software for building a community of experts.

My positive experience with StackExchange has been echoed by a bunch of others at Rally. In fact, after playing with site back in March, Rally decided to partner with StackExchange to help share the knowledge from our inaugural RallyON Conference. Specifically, we started working with the project management and programers sites, as they have good coverage of agile, lean software, scrum, kanban, test-driven development, and continuous integration topics.

I encourage you follow our lead and try out StackExchange personally and with your agile teams. I think you will find it to be a great community for capturing and sharing knowledge on agile. Don’t miss Jean’s recent post, “Life in the StackExchange Lane,” to hear about her first month with the site.

Click to register for the webinar- Defining Done

For us, StackExchange is quickly becoming an indispensable community building tool – let me tell you the story and why we are going to use it to clear questions for the next event in our agile webinar series! To get started, please see this example question on pm.stackexchange.com – “How do you define “Done” on a project?” To see how the StackExchange community is preparing for this experiment, you can view the question - “Growing the site with a new experiment” in the meta section of pm.stackexchange.com.

To understand the rational for all this work I want to explore three areas: First, recognizing what was not working for us in our community;  Second, appreciating the stack overflow approach behind StackExchange; Third, comparing and contrasting StackExchange with other Q&A sites.

It’s hard to build a general community, but we need to

Since 2004, we have been a provider of agile solutions through the combination of products and services. For our customers, Rally and its partners deliver large and sustainable gains in software development time-to-market, quality and productivity as well as increasing the sense of purpose and joy on teams. To increase the impact of agile for our users who are spread arcross 100 countries, we launched a social community in 2006; Agile Commons.

Agile Commons provided an open platform to encourage dialogue and discussions with our users and others in the community. Of course there are many places on the Internet to have these general discussions. As a result, the parts of Agile Commons that really took off were those more closely associated with Rally specific content. We just did not have enough traffic to clear the questions with well thought out answers that really covered a problem space. As a result, Agile Commons has morphed into an open commons primarily for Rally customers and users. In addition, the general Agile community discussion has continued to splinter across countless blogs (see the top 200 agile blog list – we are #12!), email lists, and twitter. Due to this splintering, it is really hard to quickly find good, well shaped answers to common agile questions.

This problem has been plaguing the agile community for years and finally boiled to the surface at the 10 year agile gathering in Snowbird this year. In that meeting the following four items were cited as critical steps to keep the community growing for the next 10 years:

• Demand Technical Excellence
• Promote Individual Change and Lead Organizational Change
• Organize Knowledge and Improve Education
• Maximize Value Creation Across the Entire Process

You can read more about the 10 years agile gathering in my February post as well as the many sites and attendees that I reference. I think the industry is ready to address this problem. Now what is the solution?

StackOverflow thinking

I have been passionate about building and sharing knowledge since I was first introduced to web technology via Mosiac in 1994; however, I would not call myself a knowledge management expert. I have continued to dip in and out of this space but being introduced to David Snowden’s work at the Lean Conference in 2010 has been a significant catalyst in my thinking and passion on social and knowledge management. His work has stoked my fire around this problem and solution space. David’s talks and the morphing of Agile Commons have driven my pursuit of a great space to manage agile knowledge in an open manner. My research took me through:

• Wikipedia on agile
• Agile Alliance Resources
• Lean Software & Systems Wiki
• Scrum Alliance community
• Linked In Groups on agile
• Google’s Knol on agile
• Quora on Agile
• Stackexchange on project management

It was StackExchange that stood out to me as the clear winner for managing what Snowden calls ordered knowledge. StackExchange’s Q&A format is truly amazing, it is first a community of experts and second a well gardened knowledge management system. See the PM StackExchange ABOUT post to understand how it is a combination of four great technologies.

If you have not tried stackexhange, jump into pm.stackexchange.com and try entering any project management question you can think of, including anything agile. As you type, you should see a list of related questions based on the keywords in your question. If you do not see your question, please enter it using these simple guidelines and make sure to use tags like agile, scrum, kanban, or TDD. The community will help you shape it into something that will get a good spectrum of answers in a matter of a week. Even in beta the PM StackExchange includes the following site stats:

I don’t care what yahoo group or wiki you are on in our community, it’s difficult find that kind of diverse network to help you with your day to day questions. As I noted, the site is still in public beta. My guess is by 2012, this community will have quadrupled.

Problems with other Q&A sites

This post is about Stackexchange, but, as I mentioned above, there are other solutions for managing a body of knowledge like this. I found a number of short-comings in those communities:

• There is not enough people in community to clear the answer broadly and quickly – too small a sample
• There is only a certain clique of people in a community that provides too much of a myopic answer – 1 right way
• There is focus on discussing and debating, not answering the question in a focused way that matches the question depth – a podium
• There is opacity with regard to governance and content ownership – lack of transparency = low trust
• There is a lack of moderation to keep the community – entropy happens

I believe StackExchange addresses all these issues in a remarkable set of people, policies and bots. I encourage you to help our community move forward by finding ways to organize and share knowledge on Agile in StackExchange. Please share your ideas and other agile resources in the comments.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally and on the way to be the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute this summer in Boulder –  See the Institute’s 2011 Fellows – Watch the intro video to the Institute and follow my escapades in the Unreasonable Mansion with twitter @RallyOn

This is a story of how I went from being the poster child for bad posting etiquette on pm.stackexchange.com to becoming their poster child for fast learner! A poignant tale of hubris, struggle, fear, benevolent mentorship, and redemption.

Prequel: The Lure

Some colleagues of mine at Rally Software (Karl Scotland, Ken Clyne, Eric Willeke, Ben Carey, and Ryan Martens) have been telling me about how much they were enjoying their experiences in StackExchange. My CTO colleagues Zach Nies and Mark Gammon have also been enthusiastic about the value of being engaged in the StackExchange community. But I was intimidated. I feared I wouldn’t know how to appropriately engage in either asking a question or answering a question. It turns out my fears were well-founded.

Scene 1: The Leap

I finally decided to jump in. I set-up an account, fairly easy to do. I perused some of the questions already posted by others. I saw the tags and the replies. I saw the voting. Somewhat intimidating. But, I had a topic I was really excited about. I thought it would make a great question. And so I made the leap; I took the plunge. And this is what was wrought:

Scene 2: The Faux Pas

Not a bad question. The problem was that in the text area below the question title, I gave further detail on the question. A lot of detail. I pulled a major faux pas: I waxed poetic on what I thought the answer was. (I’m not going to go into the topic here. Trust me. It was lengthy and unyielding. :-(

Fortunately for me, however, very timely and gentle advice appeared from Mark Phillips and jmort253:

Could they have been any nicer? What a great community!

Scene 3: Meeting with the masters

The good news is that help was on its way. Back in March, we’d spoken with Joel Spolsky (co-founder and CEO of StackExchange.) Ryan’s goal in talking with Joel was to look at how we at Rally could incorporate StackExchange into our upcoming RallyOn conference in May. How could we work together to create community in StackExchange as we were creating community in the conference?

The result? We brought in the great StackExchange masters Anna Lear and Mark Phillips to the RallyOn conference. In his opening remarks at the conference, Ryan introduced our two Zen StackExchange masters and Ryan’s hope for how we could all engage with them to kick start a powerful presence of the Agile community within StackExchange.

Yea! I was going to actually be able to work with Mark and Anna to become more comfortable and more productive in StackExchange!

Scene 4 : Lessons Learned

After Mark held a small session on getting started in StackExchange, I saw him in the hallway. I’d missed the session, but he quickly filled me in. It turned out, he’d used MY question/answer fumble as an example of how NOT to engage in StackExchange. I had become the poster child for bad StackExchange etiquette :-(

But both Anna and Mark quickly took my under their wing. We edited my original question. We commented on one of the answers. We created a new question. And we answered another question. The result was a new exchange of comments:

Close: A Happy Ending

Today, good news abounds. Mark recently wrote a phenomenal blog post: Why StackExchange is Hotter than Twitter

I continue to stay engaged asking and answering questions. I’ve learned to keep my questions short, my comments short, and my answers short. And, I’m gaining reputation points and earning badges, still with gentle guidance from Anna, Mark and “jmort253″.

My Rally colleagues continue to post as well. It is exciting to see the Agile community begin to expand in pm.stackexchange.com. Provocative questions with great answers. And through the tags, we can watch the expansion into other topic areas.

For the happiest ending of all, I’m saving the best for last: my email yesterday from StackExchange!

“Congratulations — you are one of the top new Project Management – Stack Exchange users for the month of May 2011! http://stackexchange.com/leagues/month/pm/2011-05-01 ” There was also the caveat that my name would not appear in the list of users because I still need to earn more reputation points. Okay, June, you are going down!

Help keep the story alive!

To wrap things up: I not only survived jumping into StackExchange; I love it. I’m hooked. So, my story is not over.

Now, I’d love your reply to this post to tell me how you are getting involved in StackExchange.

Jean Tabaka is an intrepid intercontinental traveller, a 6-badge holder in pm.stackexchange.com,  author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

For me RallyON was one of those – you know what, I am living my dream – moments in life. My favorite town (Boulder) was filled with 150 of our largest and best customers along with 85 expert agile practitioners from our coaching, product and technical account management teams. It was a swarm of agile expertise all gathered to share with each other for the sole purpose of getting smarter and building community. And you know what?

It turned out great! We prepared very well, the whole company came together to support it and all the right people were there. Typical for Colorado, the weather was perfect on day one (see the video below), but snowed on day two. Check out the runners pictured on top of Mount Sanitas in Boulder for our charity run with the white streaks of snow on May 11th! Fortunately, many folks also joined the Yoga class inside and we ended up donating 260 meals to our non-profit partner, Community Food Share, during the corporate challenge month.

Don’t just trust me

Please don’t just trust my words about this being a great conference! Below are a few of the artifacts from the conference including a quick video, the conference community site, links to twitter stream from the conference tag #RallyOn11 and great questions posed to StackExchange. But, the most stunning artifact is that 99% of  of the attendees surveyed said they would attend again and recommend it to another member of their team.

To give you a little taste of the setting and the energy, PLAY the video to hear a collective answer to: WHAT IS AGILE?

If you are interested in what happened at RallyON, view the Twitter archive, join the discussion, download the presentations or read the notes at the RallyOn.Rallydev.com site by clicking on the banner below. To comment or participate, simply login with your Rally username and password or create an account if you don’t have Rally credentials.

A HUGE THANK YOU

The overwhelming success of this two day event could not have happened without tons of help. A huge thank you to:

• our customers who showed up ready to learn and share – as well as present over 100 open space topics
• our product, technical account management and coaching teams for kicking day one off with Rally developed content
• Ken Clyne and Ann Konkler for being a fantastic pair in the master of ceremonies role
• our partners Accurev and StreamStep for sponsoring the event
• our internal team RallyOn for nailing the execution of this event
• Michael Cheveldave from Cognitive Edge for facilitating a track on Cynefin and complex adaptive systems
• StackExchange for sending Mark and Anna to help us ramp up in that community
• all the attendees to entered or answered questions at pm.stackexchange.com using the RallyON11 tag

I kicked off the conference by saying this was all about building a strong community. By bringing our best users together with all of our internal agile experts, it was my hope that we could address some of the problems that Jean, Eric and Liz highlighted in late 2009 with their Community of Thinkers post. And, also to run some experiments based on the shortcomings that we highlighted in the #10yrsagile celebration conference and my post. Based on feedback, usage of the RallyON community site and the excitement from the show, I think we got a community snowball rolling toward the crest of the hill.

Please let us know how you thought we did, either physically or virtually, at the conference, and share your ideas for how we can continue building our community.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally and on the way to be the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institue this summer in Boulder –  See the Institutes 2011 Fellows – Watch the intro video to the Institute .

In last week’s blog “Rationale for Project Stratus”, Ryan stated “The model articulated in Dean Leffingwell’s newest book, ”Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements, Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise“ is clearly one of the patterns of agile strategic planning.”

In this post, I want to expand on how we reached that conclusion.

I’ll start by introducing Chad Holdorf, Agile Coach and earlyvangelist for Project Stratus. Chad has been guiding Project Stratus in support of Dean’s model. Take a look at what you get with such customer collaboration: http://www.scaledagiledelivery.com/2011/04/22/agile-portfolio-planning/

Now on to how we got there:

As mentioned in the “The Making of Project Stratus” blog, we have been diligently following a customer development process based on Steven Blank’s model. Because the book focuses on startups, we adapted the model to existing companies (like Rally) wanting to deliver new solutions to their market, but one aspect that applies to both is a ruthless search for a handful (3 to 5) of what Blank calls “earlyvangelists”.

Earlyvangelists are customers that have these particular characteristics:

1. Has a problem
2. Is aware of having a problem
3. Has been actively looking for a solution
4. Has put together a solution of piece parts
5. Has or can acquire a budget

#4 and #5 are of key importance: Earlyvangelists have more than just the problem. They have it, want to solve it, already are trying something less than ideal, and have the availability and organizational authority to garner the resources to do something more about it.

With Project Stratus, we found many many customers have the problem (unrealistic roadmaps, poor visibility into development status of marketable features, lack of alignment between business goals and feature work). There is no doubt Rally has a responsibility to the market to produce an agile strategic planning solution. The challenge is finding earlyvangelists that can guide a successful solution to that problem.

We have been grateful to locate a handful of earlyvangelists: customers who have installed the Stratus preview application with their roadmap data, run their planning process for real with it and kept my inbox interesting with plenty of “Catherine, this is great but I need X to really make it work for us.”

If you are attending our RallyON conference on May 10 and 11, you’ll get to meet Chad. If not, track the Scaled Agile Delivery videos he has posted on his site. Thanks Chad for contributing so actively to Project Stratus!

As you can tell, it takes a while to get to the commercial product the right way to ensure the product will be a success for both Rally and its customers.

As we work at delivering the first release of our agile strategic planning product to support the first identified pattern, we are working with other Chads – Nina, Jeff, Dale, and others – to further our study of strategic planning patterns that would warrant product support. Please stay tuned.

Catherine Connor is a Product Marketing Director at Rally Software. She focuses on leveraging agile and lean values for the product manager role. She is the lead for Project Stratus.

I love the leverage  you get when strategic planning is working well.

At Rally, I run our strategic planning process with help from Jean and others in our organization. We have experimented with many agendas, internal facilitators and guests, but we’ve found the most success when Jean facilitates these meetings and I lead them. It is challenging work and we try really hard to create a setting that leads to magic and allows the best to emerge from the group.  As you might imagine, if you know Jean and me, we never stop trying to improve the process. In addition to our desire to keep advancing, the context at Rally keeps changing. Whether from growth, hiring, market changes, maturation of agile, or changes in customer demographics; our overall setting for strategic planning keeps shifting. It is a difficulty that we wrestle with, but knowing it is ultimately unsolvable, we have learned to embrace the dance.

I do not recall what was the chicken and what was the egg, but we started working on strategic agile topics last year and it launched two efforts and blog series: N Levels of Planning, and Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. In this post I am bringing the two series together to explore tooling the process of strategic planning in an agile context with Catherine and Ronica. Larger Rally customers and past employers have shown that managing a strategic plan in a spreadsheet creates vacuums. Through our efforts at Rally, we have learned that trying to maintain strategic alignment with our development teams without a single source of record to visualize variances on plan versus actual is challenging. (HINT: Slides are not a very capable source-of-record :)

It is difficult to integrate big-bang, waterfall planning/stage-gates and traditional budgeting with effective agile teams who keep learning and adjusting. It is even more difficult to stay on course as an agile organization without effectively closing the feedback loop on roadmap/strategic planning efforts. In the first instance, it is easy to simply be driven by a naive plan. In the latter, it is easy for the development effort to drift apart from the goals and direction.

These well-validated difficulties led to the birth of Project Stratus and the N-Levels of Planning efforts at Rally. These two initiatives are intended to help increase the effectiveness of strategic planning in an agile context.  They are helping us balance the need for forecasting delivery while also benefiting from the fast feedback that flows out of agile teams and programs. We like to talk about this process as steering realistic roadmaps to maximize the delivery of value.

To explore this problem space, we diligently carried out discovery and validation exercises that led to a working application (Project Stratus) and a service offering (Agile Strategic Planning) that we use to ensure the delivery of a Whole Solution. Through our customer interviews, we found that the most common strategic planning solution when doing agile development is a strategic planning person holding the plan of record in an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet holds some form of a roadmap of releases, programs and resource allocations. It is updated on a regular cycle, typically quarterly. However, two major problems exist with the spreadsheet approach.

1. The plan is outdated as soon as the work starts because there are two sources of data; one for planning and one for tracking progress
2. Planning in a vacuum happens as correlating the empirical data into a highly customized spreadsheet leads to outdated data which tends to erode trust

As a result, this most common solution is horribly disappointing with human translations that lead to over-aggressive estimates and/or status updates progress reports. Bringing agile values into this faulty process will shorten feedback loops and bring real data effectively into the cycle.

In exploring the space, we are discovering multiple ways that organizations manage the strategic planning process. As we are still making sense of these patterns, it is early to report on our findings.  However, one approach does stand out.

The model articulated in Dean Leffingwell’s newest book, ”Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements, Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise“ is clearly one of the patterns of agile strategic planning. You can see a snapshot of this method on his blog, but if you really want to learn it, you should get his book. It is a clear articulation of how to manage your strategic priorities as series of releases. The book breaks the problem into three agile requirements management areas: the team, the program and the portfolio. The beauty of this approach is how it trains all levels of product owners, product managers and portfolio managers to run in agile unison. Dean developed this model starting with the teams and working systematically up through the enterprise portfolio level (ie bottom to top). And, importantly, Dean worked this iteratively through a number of his consulting customers over the past decade (see the Big Picture section of his blog to the incremental progress laid out over time).

In addition, in Agile Software Requirements, Dean has described a “business epic kanban system” which he uses to make the work in process visible, understand the state of epics as they transition to development, and to get the portfolio planners on a similar agile page as are the agile development teams. He and a number of our customers have used this system effectively in a number of large enterprises, so we know it makes a good starting model for portfolio/strategic planners who run portfolios as a sereis of releases.

As a result, this model of strategic allocation and roadmap planning is proven to work well for agile teams that ship code series of releases. Here is Dean’s model from that book and his web site.

Big Picture: Scaled Agile Delivery Model by Dean Leffingwell

We have a number of customers making very good progress in developing strategic roadmap steering capabilities using this approach and Rally’s Project Stratus. If you are interested in this approach paired with Stratus, consider contacting Dean or Ronica, our services owner, directly or through your Rally Account Manager. (See Ronica’s contact information below.)

We will continue to explore hybrid waterfall/stage-gate, other hybrid agile (scrum/kanban), and continuous flow techniques for strategic planning in the coming months. Please stay tuned.

Finally, to fully explore the problem and solution space, we created the RallyON conference. We will host this conference in Boulder on May 10th and 11th. We limited the conference to 150 attendees and it has sold out quickly to our most active users and champions. Don’t worry if you are not attending as there are a number of ways to engage in the conversation including:

• Responding to this post with your challenges, ideas and comments on strategic planning in an agile context
• Sharing your opinion or challenges related to topics that Rally Coaches, Technical Account Managers and Product team members are posting for the conference on our new Coaching Blog.
• Posting your agile, scrum, kanban and xp questions on pm.stackexchange.com or programers.stackexchange.com to have a the community formulate answers to your questions prior, during and after the conference. We will have expert users from both of these stackexhanges on site at the conference to help us leverage this rapidly growing community.
• No matter what choice you make, please tweet your efforts with the #RallyOn11 hashtag. It will get the attention of the Rally coaches, technical account managers and product team, in addition to all the physical and virtual RallyOn attendees.

Please join us online before during and after the conference to explore the topic of strategic agile.

About the authors:

Ryan Martens is a member of NRDC’s Environmental Entrepreneurs,  founder/CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder/CTO at Rally Software Development.

Special Thanks to Catherine Connor, the lead on Project Stratus at Rally and Solutions Evangelist Ronica Roth, who owns our Services strategy at Rally.You can reach Ronica at ronica[at]rallydev.com