Agile Development Blog

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), Flickr, Facebook, 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.

• Jean Tabaka and Julie Chickering: Enterprise Agile Visioning and Learning
• Aaron Sanders and Carlton Nettleton: There’s an Agile Game for that
• Karl Scotland: Dr W. Edwards Deming’s Famous Red Bead Experiment – For Software Teams
• Ken Clyne and Eric Willeke: Putting the Fun Back in Your Retrospectives
• Aaron Sanders: Ten Tales of Positive Change
• Ken Clyne and Julie Chickering: Risk Management Game
• Karl Scotland and Eric Willeke: Flow Games
• Jean Tabaka: Tell me Why: The Golden Circle of Agile Transformation
• Steve Adolph and Philippe Kruchten: Reconciling Perspectives: How People Manage the Process of Software Development
• Shane Hastie and Steve Adolph: Agile Thinking for Business Analysis-Going Beyond User Stories
• Karl Scotland: Designing a Kanban System for the Enterprise

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:

• The Salesforce Foundation’s Social Enterprise Model that is funded through license sales
• The DemandTec Retail Challenge funded by the company and partners
• The Whole Foods’ Whole Planet Foundation microfinance loan pool, donated by customers

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

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 .

Next week we are running a fun experiment in Boulder, as we host our first users conference: RallyOn 2011. We are experimenting with a number of things as we learn how to engage, connect, and contribute to our growing world-wide customer community.

First, we are trying to leverage social technologies in a number of ways to reach users all around the world. One way we are doing this is by using Stack Exchange, the Internet’s leading community-driven Q&A engine, to meld a community of agile software development and program management experts. Conceivably, this could kick-off a new paradigm in professional conferences, attaining the elusive goal of extending the conference experience of networking, knowledge sharing and community into the online environment with virtual attendees, and living long after the closing session.

We invited representatives from Stack Exchange to join the conference, promoting and shepherding the community experience. As a result, two members from the Programmers and Project Management communities will be in attendance, sponsored by Stack Exchange. Mark and Anna, who have coauthored this post, have already brought guidance and energy to the interactions between communities, and are sure to do so during RallyOn, as these two communities closely align with the goals of the conference and the interests of our attendees.

Cool stuff about Stack Exchange that I bet you did not know:
You may be familiar with Stack Exchange’s most popular site, Stack Overflow, the flagship software programming Q&A site that receives tens of millions of visitors each month. However, the vision far exceeds that single site. Since August 2010, the company has launched 49 new vertical-oriented Q&A sites. By building vibrant communities of experts around specific topics, Stack Exchange is able to facilitate answers to 94% of all questions network-wide.

• Questions generally average 10 answers, giving you different insights and approaches to tackling problems or issues.
• Answers are peer-reviewed by experts within the community, with those answers receiving the most positive votes rising to the top, guaranteeing the most accurate, relevant or acceptable answer to even the most difficult question.
• Optimized for search engines, these answers help hundreds if not thousands of other people who are seeking answers to similar questions on the web.
• The experts forge a community of subject matter enthusiasts, earning reputation and recognition for their contributions through the reputation point system.

At Rally, we have a fantastic marketing department that puts on great regional events and huge webinars, but we have never done a users conference. However, we are not sure what the best model for our users conference should be. So we are bringing a community of experts and Agile enthusiasts together around the RallyOn 2011 conference. With the help of two enthusiastic Stack Exchange members to showcase the power and benefits of a community-driven Q&A network like Stack Exchange, we are excited about adding a whole new group of Agile experts to our current communities.

To help track the success of this endeavor, we’ve created a special RallyOn11 tag on each Stack Exchange site. Please tag your questions with this tag and also include it in your profile. Participation is a snap, and we’ll be there at the conference to give you a hand.

While exploring the Stack Exchange sites, check out the RallyOn11 tag to discover peers with similar questions and interests. We’ll also be streaming live feeds from the sites directly to a monitor at the conference, allowing you to observe the community’s activity in real-time.

What’s in it for you?

• As a director, the sites give your team an existing resource to crowd-source problems and find solutions from a group of subject matter experts.
• As a director, the Project Management community often addresses management level problems including those involving other managers, executives and team members.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, these sites are a resource your customers can turn to stay on the right track.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, you can build your reputation and find inspiration for new ways of approaching issues.
• As a developer, you can find answers to programming problems, project management concerns or challenges interacting with management.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Programmers
Programmers attracts software development experts with interests in subject areas such as development methodologies, architecture practices, and algorithm and data structure concepts. It evolved out of the flagship Stack Overflow site when it became apparent that a separate place to ask questions about general software development concepts and programmers’ professional development, rather than specific implementation details, was needed. An example of this type of question can be found here.

Anna Lear (@aalear) is joining us from the programmers community, and is one of the community’s respected moderators.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Project Management
Project Management covers a wide array of topics including: learning and implementing project management, challenges in managing projects and people (as well as challenges with project managers) and specific techniques and best practices from different methodologies. Project management approaches discussed include Agile, Waterfall, the PMBOK Guide, PRINCE2, ITIL and mish-mash of methodology that often gets implemented in the real world.

Mark Phillips (@mpmobile) is joining us from the project management community, having been a member of that community since its earliest days.

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.

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.