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Whenever I use John Deere as an example of a fantastic Agile adoption, I always get looks of surprise. That’s quickly followed by an ‘a-ha’ moment when I share that today’s

From my visit to the test farm in Des Moines - note all of the hardware on top of the tractors

tractors are run by more lines of code than the early space shuttles. Yesterday, ComputerWorld published a great article about John Deere’s Agile adoption, characterized as a ‘big bang’ across their 800-person development organization within a year. It’s definitely worth the 5 minute read.

By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the Earth.

In 50 years, the world population will require 100% more food. Seventy percent of that food is expected to come from efficiency-improving technology. John Deere considers these their user stories, and they strive to use technology to help solve these global problems. If the ComputerWorld article is worth 5 minutes of your time, then Chad Holdorf’s in-depth talk is worth every bit of 25 minutes to hear John Deere’s bigger vision and how they inspire teams to tackle it at John Deere.

You can work with John Deere too.

I’ve been honored to work with Tony Thelen, director of John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group, and Chad Holdorf, their Agile Coach, throughout this transformation. And I share their passion for connecting engineers to solve these potentially disastrous problems. I’d like nothing more than to see some smart folks go to work for John Deere.

With my son in a John Deere plow.

Tractors and Agile? Absolutely. I can’t think of a better example of how software is shaping the world we live in – every single day. Congratulations Tony and Chad and best of luck on your social mission.

Ryan Martens is founder and CTO of Rally Software, a hopeful Citizen Engineer and a recovering Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @RallyOn.

Are you an engineer? If so, our society needs you to apply yourself to the global warming and other global social problems for the remainder of your life.

Just before the Holidays, an article I wrote ran in Fast Company on the call-to-action I believe all engineers need to embrace. Read the article, “Engineers: Why Aren’t You Doing Work For Good?

Is this a calling that resonates with you? Do you think it’s feasible? If so, how can we get there? I would love to hear from 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.

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

Agile Copenhagen

Agile Open Forum, Copenhagen Denmark

LESS 2011, Stockholm Sweden


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

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.

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:

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.

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.

Rally was founded shortly after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, the document created at a 2001 meeting of leading software developers at Snowbird, Utah, that gave rise to the Agile movement. Since then, Rally has taken what we’ve learned from leading countless enterprise Agile transformations and funneled our collective experience into a formula that includes our Agile ALM platform and products, our expert coaching services, a vast library of educational resources, and a supportive community for asking questions and sharing advice. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the signing of the Agile Manifesto, Rally had a special commemorative activity at the Agile2011 conference.

Bryce Widom, chalkboard artist and painter, joined us and literally drew, in real-time, the history of Agile. Rally team members and conference attendees collaborated on the stories that made up this “Road to Agility” starting with the Agile Manifesto, and continuing with important milestones such as Dr. Dobb’s Agile adoption survey, Forrester’s Agile ALM Wave report and the formation of the PMI’s Agile community of practice. Bryce also drew colorful stories that illustrated benefits of agility from companies like Betfair, John Deere and McKesson.

Announcements

The announcements we made at the conference are a culmination of Rally’s experience in helping organizations expand Agile practices to maximize value across the entire organization, along with strengthening support for multi-process development (check out these video interviews on SSQ’s blog to hear more). Our first announcement highlights Rally’s support for multi-process Agile. As Agile moves deeper into new functional areas, Rally’s Agile ALM platform, products and coaching services have been evolving to meet these diverse needs. When Scrum is not the best fit, we include support for other Agile methods such as Kanban and high-assurance methods to ensure that we can be the go-to partner for all enterprise Agile roll-outs. We announced:

  • Enhanced Kanban support, including support for Class of Service highlighting and reporting. Read this product blog post for more details.
  • Support for new customizable defect reports that support all processes.
  • A new Iteration Summary Panel for Scrum teams that provides in-product coaching assistance. The panel guides teams based on their performance and offers coaching-authored best practices.
  • Apps that support traceability and documentation in Rally within High Assurance organizations (check out this blog series on High Assurance Software Development).

Our second announcement signifies the bridging of Agile into the Project Management Office (PMO). In its 10th year, Agile’s mainstream appeal has broadened its reach from the technical to the business parts of the organization. We recognize the trend and are helping to ease the transition for all parties. We announced:

  • Unmatched integrations with industry-leading Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) vendors like Oracle Primavera, CA Clarity, Daptiv, and Planisware.
  • An update to Rally Idea Manager, the leading Agile ALM demand management solution. This release bolsters the integration with Rally and provides a new leaderboard to drive end-user engagement.
  • Availability of a new Agile Portfolio Steering services offering. This offering represents the next frontier of Agile and includes an interactive simulation to facilitate collaboration between Agile teams and business stakeholders.

Field Guide

At Agile2010, we provided vuvuzelas in celebration of the World Cup and, while I’m sure that many of you annoyed your families with these, we decided to leave you with a lasting educational giveaway at Agile2011. We assembled a content guide written by our coaches on Agile best practices. We hope you find this field guide useful in your day-to-day activities – download your copy here.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the “Road to Agility” illustration, whether you were at Agile2011 or were following our progress on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. In addition to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Agile Manifesto with the community at Agile2011, Rally also embraced the opportunity to reflect on how much we’ve learned from helping some of the world’s largest organizations apply Agile practices. We look forward to making continued meaningful improvement in our industry, and leading the next 10 years of Agile innovation.

Todd Olson is VP of Product at Rally Software. He is a marathon runner and cake baker. Find Todd on Twitter at @tolson.

It’s Agile 2011!

In my post last week, Agile and Rally – We’ve come a long way, I mentioned that Rally has a special commemorative activity at our booth this year. Now that the conference is here, I wanted to share more about this cool activity and let you know how you can participate with us.

Illustrating Agility

Starting today and throughout the conference, Rally will be illustrating, literally, the past, present and future of Agile’s exponential growth from the Agile Manifesto through mainstream adoption, and beyond. We need your ideas to help shape this illustration! If you are attending the conference, please stop by the Rally booth during exhibit hours and tell us about your Agile adoption, your most important milestones and the trends you think will shape the future of agility. If you’re not at our booth, or not even at the conference this week, you can also tweet your submission #roadtoagility. Then be sure to stick around and see our performance illustrator Bryce Widom drawing submissions in real-time.

We will be sharing photos of the illustration throughout the conference. Join us on Twitter (the #RoadtoAgility hashtag), FlickrFacebook, and through the comments below to contribute your ideas, share your thoughts and see how the illustration evolves.

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 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created with 17 signatories from around the world. Following on the heels of the first XP conference in Sardinia in 2000, the Manifesto fired its shot of agility across the Waterfall bow. A year later, at XP/Agile Universe 2002, I found myself standing at a folding table with Janet Danforth of Facilitator4Hire. We were selling facilitation services to the members of the Agile community gathered at a Courtyard by Marriott in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Approximately 80-100 people had come together in that steamy summer venue to continue Agile discussions and to define ongoing growth of methodologies, practices and frameworks.

Where we were

At the same time I was at my folding table in Lincolnshire in 2002, Ryan Martens was at a whiteboard in Boulder, Colorado. Ryan was brainstorming ideas about how he could use Agile practices to create a Software as a Service platform in the Agile domain. His goal? To provide zero-waste, low-carbon emissions applications and services for this growing, vibrant community.

In 2003, the Agile community gathered in Salt Lake City for the Agile Development Conference. This was my first time presenting at an Agile conference. Janet Danforth and I conducted a workshop: Collaboration 4 Agile Projects. And, unbeknownst to me, Ryan was also in Salt Lake City for his first Agile conference. As Ryan was busy engaging vendors about how they were supporting the adoption of Agile, I was busy networking with Agile thought leaders and helping to found “The Freaking Flock” (you’ll have to ask me about that in person!) Our paths were set and Agile was on the move.

Fast Forward to 2011

Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.

The Agile 2011 conference is an exciting one for both Agile and Rally. We are pleased once again to be a Title Sponsor of the conference. This year, August 8-12, Rally has 11 speaking sessions on the wonderfully vast and diverse program.

We’ve also participated behind the scenes in advance of the conference as producers, co-producers and reviewers for various conference stages. And, once again, we’ll have a booth where you can come to meet our Agile coaches, talk with our technical gurus, and see the latest that is happening with Rally’s Agile ALM platform and services. Plus, you won’t want to miss our special commemorative activity at the booth this year. Stay tuned to the blog and follow our Twitter hashtag #roadtoagility for more details on how you can participate with us!

Going back to my history of Agile and Rally and the conferences

Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.

From the folding table to now

Some things have changed in Rally’s Agile journey. We’ve grown from a 20-person company in 2004 to over 250 people and counting. Ryan is now the head of the office of the CTO. Richard is now the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Brad is our Vice President of Field Operations. And I am an Agile Fellow in the Office of the CTO.

From a Manifesto, a whiteboard, folding tables, and a single speaker to title sponsorship with multiple speakers, producers, reviewers, and booth presence in a true exhibit hall at a conference with over 1,600 attendees, we’ve indeed come a long way!

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

Along with our Project Stratus initiative (see our Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level blog series), Rally Idea Manager is a big piece of Rally’s goal to extend agility outside of development and into the enterprise.

Traditional ways in which product management collects user input – customer visits, enhancement request forms, homegrown systems, and commercial product management tools – tend to fall apart as development goes Agile.  Agile teams are hungry for user input as their frequent delivery schedule calls for fast feedback loops to continuously influence development.  Agile teams know it’s important to build things right, but making sure they build the right things requires product managers to engage quickly with customers around the world.

Product managers have another challenge in our competitive world — they can’t just take feature requests at face value. True product innovation comes from understanding the WHY behind feature requests. Rally Idea Manager is a social site specifically designed for actively engaging users in frequent conversations and getting to the WHY.

Rally Idea Manager was released a year ago to help product managers effectively prioritize their product backlogs by increasing the understanding of users’ needs. Powered by our partner Brightidea, the leader in ideation and innovation systems, Rally Idea Manager is honed for product marketers and product managers working with Agile teams.

That launch was a result of Rally’s own Agile product management experience. When I started at Rally in the summer 2007, we had just launched Agile Commons with a “Feature Requests” hive to discuss product ideas. Three years later (last October) we adopted Rally Idea Manager, and branded our site “Rally Ideas.” With Rally Ideas, we have been learning how to effectively leverage a user community to drive innovation in our products and to account for user input into our brutal prioritization process.

This month, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Rally Idea Manager launch, we released a bunch of added value for product managers to keep their user community vibrant, including things like:

  • A user reputation system and leaderboard: to monitor and incentivize user participation in the community
  • Customizable idea tabs: for users to easily locate their favorite ideas and for product managers to highlight special features in this week’s discussions
  • Improved search: to minimize the creation of duplicate ideas
  • Rally integration enhancements: to link new ideas to existing Rally stories and update idea statuses based on any Rally story states
  • Better idea status change notifications: to keep users informed of specific status changes
  • A “idea interest report by company” report: to better understand the specific needs of a given customer

The below demo highlights some of the new additions. To learn more, read the Product Blog from Rally’s site owner, who is blazing new trails with our own deployment of Rally Idea Manager (Rally Ideas), so we can improve the offering for you to engage with your own end-users.

And because launching a user community site is new to many organizations, we decided to consolidate our 4 years (and counting) of learning into a 2-day workshop where you can learn how to set up your very own Rally Idea Manager site. The workshop covers how to setup your site (frankly, that’s the easy part), how to market your site, who to involve in your organization and how to keep your site vibrant so user input keeps flowing into product backlogs. Interested? Contact rim@rallydev.com for more information.

Catherine Connor is a Product Marketing Director and product owner for Rally Idea Manager. She loves Colorado summers (which finally arrived this year), for all the camping, hiking, biking and sailing opportunities!

I leave on sabbatical next week to be the Entrepreneur in Residence at the Unreasonable Institute as they kick off their six-week program for 2011 (see my earlier post for background on the sabbatical). If you are in Boulder or flying by this summer and you dig social venture efforts, you should definitely consider attending one of the Unreasonable Events.

The Institute’s Global Summit and VIP reception were fantastic last year and attending these events are what got me hooked on spending my sabbatical with this group. Daniel, Teju and Tyler knocked the ball out of the park last summer and I can’t wait to be more involved this year.

When I say involved, I am going to be at the Unreasonable headquarters four to five days a week and leading recitation sessions for five of the 2011 fellows. I am also going to be working on the business model for the Rally Foundation. The Rally Foundation is the evolution of our corporate social responsibility (CSR) team and additional corporate stock funding. The CSR group has ramped up in 2011, and we are now focused on making our efforts sustainable in the long-term. We do not just want to grant 5% of our capital every year, we want to do more and more every year.

I get inspiration for a self-sustaining foundation model from three examples:

To kick off Rally’s Foundation efforts and the Unreasonable Fellows of 2011, Ben Carey and I will be teaching a course on Business Model Canvas on Tuesday, June 21st at the Atlas building on the University of Colorado campus. Our course will be based on Ben’s post on the 1-hour session he gave at our RallyON conference in May, along with Alexander Osterwalder’s post about how Business Model Canvas links with Steve Blank’s customer development in the area of social entrepreneurship.

In the spirit of being unreasonable and helping to kick-off our Foundation’s efforts, we have decided to help sponsor Unreasonable.TV this summer. This is a fantastic effort focused on sharing the experiences and stories of the the Unreasonable entrepreneurs. Our Foundation team is really excited about the alignment of vision and values between the Unreasonable Institute and the Rally Foundation.

Let us know what you think and hopefully we will see you at some of the Unreasonable events this summer.

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

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