Agile Development Blog

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.

Six weeks ago, I turned off the the Rally Software hose of work, and turned on a 24 hour by 7 day per week fire-hose called the Unreasonable Institute 2011. Now I am back to tell about the sabbatical that I introduced to this blog back in June.

Fellow on stage at The Unreasonable Climax - George Bernard Shaw looking on

I am NOT leaving Rally to start a social venture, though many people asked me that question over the last six weeks. Instead, I am investing with other Rally employees at creating a social enterprise inside of Rally.

Wow – that was fantastic experience with 26 entrepreneurs from 11 countries who all have the potential to change the lives of 1 million or more people.  There was so much energy at that place, I did not get recharged; I got energized. I was brought into a great family and I feel great about helping on so many levels, but I do not long for the lonely start-up days again. Given the success we have all had at Rally and the culture for give-back and entrepreneurship, I feel like I/we will have a huge impact on the world by intrapreneuring on the Rally Foundation.

What most people do not realize is that the Unreasonable Institute was the perfect place to incubate our new social venture, the Rally Foundation.  The Rally Foundation is our own social venture that we are developing to help social enterprises around the world use agility to amplify their impact. My sabbatical just put more fuel behind that fire and taking time to talk again with Suzanne DiBianca from the Salesforce Foundation and Brian Breckenridge from LinkedIn really stoked the fire with successful social enterprise case studies.

By immersing myself into the world of the Unreasonable Institute, I was able to gain empathy for these social entrepreneurs, engineers and funders. As such, I created an empathy map to help understand and share the pains and true needs of these organizations. With these early hunches articulated, our Foundation team is now running the customer development process to help us make this initial launch of the foundation very successful.

Now I was not just on a research mission to help our Foundation; I was there primarily to mentor the 2011 Fellows and to help them create successful social ventures. I was also a member of “the team” of the Unreasonable Institute as a recitation leader. No matter which these perspectives you look at, the sabbatical was a huge bonfire of success.

Mentoring fellows

As a mentor, I focused my attention on teaching the Steve Blank’s tools of customer development and the Burt Decker techniques of public speaking. On the first Tuesday of the Institute, Ben Carey and I taught a morning session focused on customer development and business model generation. In the afternoon, we did 1:1 sessions with fellows on their models. That satisfied most people’s needs, except for Anne at Afroes.  I had the good fortune to work with Anne for the next four weeks on the shape of her business model and canvas.  The business model canvas and the basic four steps of customer development allowed these fellows to tease apart their businesses and tell a story using very simple business language. As I wrote in the Unreasonable Blog, most of these business models are very complicated by multiple customer segments, value propositions and revenue/impact drivers. Before these models, it was very hard for these entrepreneurs to tell simple stories about their ventures.

The first pass at a business model canvas by one fellow

As the pressure built on the fellows toward their funding trip to San Francisco, I got more and more requests for presentation feedback and coaching.  I turned to my Decker training and grid to help these folks. With the help of another mentor, we focused the grid by locking in the three points on:

1. 50,000 feet to tell the story of problem/solution
2. 30,000 feet to tell the story of product/market fit
3. 3 feet to tell the managerial economics story of why the venture works and scales

As some of the 20 Rallyers who attended community pitches and the Unreasonable Climax, they could see the Decker grids emerging. I used my Ipad to film and review pitches 1:1 with the fellows. It was a powerful and rapid feedback cycle. It was not the 9 video sessions I did at Decker training, but it was fast learning.

Running a recitation

As a member of the 2^nd-year Unreasonable team with Daniel, Teju, Tyler, Ceasar, Megah and Lindsey, I was just a part-timer.  My title was Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR), and I ran a recitation and facilitate the final group retrospective. I did not live next door to the mansion or run the 24X7 full emersion like this team. I lived four miles away with my family, and friends. My role as a member of the team was to run one of the five weekly recitation groups – mine included Maria, Cynthia, Luis, Jamie and Myskin.

The recitation process was new this year and worked well, but not great. Given the fully packed schedule of the Institute, the opportunity to take meetings while in the US, and the fact that most of these entrepreneurs were still running ventures; it was hard to keep the rhythm of Saturday recitations from 3:30 to 6:30 PM. I tried to structure our group around the highly successful Entrepreneur’s Organizations forum groups. These peer-to-peer forums allow young leaders to get coaching and mentoring from their peers. Because we could not hold the meeting times, the forum structure did not hold either.  However, given the 24X7 live-in format of the Unreasonable Institute, there was no shortage of peer support. This group formed into a family very quickly. We saw birthday parties, engagement parties, family picnics, late-night club dancing and some very sad good-byes. I enjoyed our recitation. It got me a closer look at the real lives of these young social entrepreneurs.  As I am not much of an executer, I believe we could have done better and that other groups were more successful in this structure.

Researching problems for our Foundation

Though I stopped my flow of work, I did not stop my flow of non-profit work. As the Institute ran, I continued to run the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and be an active member of the Rally Foundation team. I even had both these teams meet at the Unreasonable Mansion to help experience the place and people up close, including the lack of air conditioning. After Ben and I did the customer development class, I became convinced that our Foundation team needed to follow that model too. As part of my time at the Unreasonable Institute, our team did interviews with the Salesforce.com Foundation, Linked-In Foundation, Unicef, IDEO.org, Engineers without Borders and Engineering for Developing Communities as well as a number of the fellows. It was a target-rich environment and we sized the moment to kick-off our problem/solution discovery process.

I am very happy with the time I gave to the Unreasonable Institute this summer. I would encourage other Rally sabbatical takers to follow a similar approach and get into the context of their future while on sabbatical. I was able to give, learn and grow by jumping in with this very unique situation. As a result, I helped build the wave of momentum behind the launch of the Rally Foundation – our social enterprise.

Finally, I am wrote this on a plane headed toward Tofino BC, Canada for a real vacation.  My sabbatical was not what most people think of as a break. It was a fantastic opportunity afforded me by 7 fun years at Rally; but I did catch Coho salmon and surf Canada on a real vacation.   I hope everyone is having a great time at Agile 2011 with the illustrations and the great announcements this week on Kanban, reporting, idea management and portfolio management partners.

If you want more details on the Unreasonable Institute, the fellows or my blow-by-blow account, you can:

• Enjoy the twitter stream for #unreasonable2011,
• See the chatter on the Unreasonable Facebook site
• Watch the first three Unreasonable.TV episodes for 2011; or
• Read my three blog posts on the Unreasonable Blog.

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

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

Starting on June 16th, I will be taking a six week sabbatical from Rally to be the Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at the Unreasonable Institute. This institute, an incubator for social ventures, was formed in 2010 in Boulder by a talented array of recent CU graduates. Watch this 2 minute trailer to understand what they did last year:

(See all the Unreasonable TV episodes from last year.)

In the past, I have mentored TechStars teams here in Boulder and loved the work. Here at Rally, I’ve led and worked on the company’s social mission, our green team and the corporate social responsibility team. I consider myself socially aware. But when I attended the Unreasonable Institute’s Global Summit event last summer in Boulder, I was blown away.   The quality of the people, their concepts, the high caliber of the program and the great video coverage really opened my eyes to the possibility of scaling these efforts fast.  The large, complex social problems this Institute’s entrepreneurs are working to solve are so very compelling to me.  I believe this EIR role is a unique opportunity for me to push my thinking by working daily for five weeks with these well-vetted social entrepreneurs.  To me, this sabbatical is about working outside the business to broaden my perspective and shape the heuristics of complex social solutions. This is not what I do in a typical week where I would simply work “on” or “in” the business.  In essence, it is my effort to continue to find ways to scale myself as Sheryl Sandberg describes in her Stanford Thought Leader’s podcast. But it is also a way for my team at Rally to grow based on my absence.

Rally’s sabbatical program is about service and “mental slack” time

As you might remember from my Thank You Sun Microsystems post, Rally created our sabbatical program based on the Sun Microsystems model with help from an ex-Sun HR director.  As the longest serving employee at Rally, I am the first proof point of our sabbatical program.  As such, I hope through my choices that Rally employees who become eligible to apply to this program after seven years of service will find a way for this unique opportunity to help them scale themselves as well.  I think of the benefits of this program as “mental slack time.”  We all need this time to sharpen our personal vision, work outside the business, and scale ourselves. In so doing, we can bring multiple forms of value, to the business and to our communities.  I think of this sabbatical work just like those three Citizenship merit badges in Boy Scouts or an Agile hack-a-thon for yourself.

At Rally this is a benefit you earn, but you have to apply for it.  Your application gets reviewed by your manager and the executive leaders for purpose and value to you, the business and society. If your sabbatical aligns with the social mission of Rally, you may even be eligible for additional funding to support your efforts from the Rally Foundation.  The criteria is not extremely hard. But we know that the process of long-term personal planning and working outside our business leads to great passion in our people and innovations for our business.

For my part, as an EIR with the Unreasonable Institute, I will be leveraging personal experiences from across my software and non-profit start-up efforts.  I already know I plan to  teach a class to the 2011 participants on business model canvases, Lean Start-ups and Agile with one of Rally’s coaches, Ben Carey.  But mostly, my eyes are wide open to helping the entrepreneurs make magic and form promising organizations.  Scaling to solve large social problems like poverty, lack of clean water, global climate change and net access are the mysteries we need to solve as we grow past 7 Billion people on the planet.

Help the Unreasonable Institute break molds

Through the Unreasonable Institute, Daniel Epstein, Teju Ravilochan and Tyler Hartung are breaking all kinds of molds. I’m proud to join them and the rest of the team this summer in their work.  Each year, twenty-five entrepreneurs are selected to attend the Institute. This year, the Institute has narrowed the field of possible attendees from 300 to 50. January 20th marked the opening of its Finalist Marketplace . In the marketplace, these 50 finalists are challenged to raise the $8,000 tuition fee in order to attend. However, they are not allowed to pay their own way! The first 25 entrepreneurs to raise the necessary fee from the Internet become the invited entrepreneurs for this 2011 session. And, you can be a part of this! Consider joining the marketplace to help select the entrepreneurs you believe deserve a chance to participate.

I hope you will consider this kind of effort for yourself and even your organization

My hope is that people strive to push themselves up the steps of social responsibility and citizenship.  Consider the model from Mark Kramer and Michael Porter at FSG (see their HBR article on Strategy and Society), in which they paint a world of three levels of corporate social responsibility:

1. Generic Social Issues - Social issues that neither are significantly impacted by the company’s operations, nor materially affect its long term competitiveness
2. Value Chain Impacts - Social issues that  are significantly impacted by the company’s activities in the ordinary course of business
3. Competitive Context – Social issues in the company’s external environment that affect the underlying drivers of competitiveness in the locations where the company operates

At Rally, we worked hard in 2010 to shape our social mission and foundation

Rally has gained a tremendous amount of direction with our corporate social responsibility work from Marc Benioff and Suzanne DiBianca in the model they formed at the Salesforce.com Foundation. And we’ve been informed by the Entrepreneur’s Foundation Corporate Citizenship Conference.  We will continue to share more of the details of this work as our Foundation finalizes.

The benefits of social responsibility work has been amazing in my life.  I’ve benefited from immediate emotional returns, wonderful ideas, amazing relationships and long-term feedback on my purpose and goals in life.  Even without a sabbatical program,  I hope you will consider some step up on the social responsibility ladder this year. One of the most unique benefits of corporate social responsibility came after my dinner to sign up for the EIR opportunity, I got a 3′ penguin (the mascot of Unreasonable Institute).  If the penguin has anything to say about it, it’s going to be a great summer!

A simple answer to the title of this post – NO this is not Unreasonable slack time! It is some of the best work you can do for yourself, your business, your community and society.  Don’t forget to visit – Share the 1/1/1 Model, Entrepreneur’s Foundation, EFCO, Serve.gov or follow the Unreasonable Institute on RSS, Twitter, TV.

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Congratulations to the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute on their recent 2 year birthday and on a very successful quarter including a $92,000 Technical Assistance Grant from the Community Development Financial Institution Fund (CDFI). That grant and others will assist in building their capacity and efforts toward being certified as a CDFI. The CDFI focuses on enabling ”financial institutions to provide credit, capital, and financial services to underserved populations and communities in the United States.”

Rally is proud to be a 2010 partner with RMMFI as part of our ’1%Fund’ program which encourages employees to spend 1% of their paid time volunteering. In 2009 this program led to the contribution of over 2,300 volunteer hours. As part of an effort to increase our skill-based volunteering during 2010, Rally recently collaborated with RMMFI on a non-profit Salesforce.com Foundation implementation of Salesforce.com.

Rally’s Matt Harutun from customer support led this initiative after learning about the RMMFI team’s desire to integrate Salesforce.com into their business. Matt’s reflections on this partnership underscore the value of shared vision and continuous collaboration in creating a successful outcome.

I started the project, having enough knowledge of the Salesforce.com to be dangerous. I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to partner with RMMFI and help them deploy Salesforce.com successfully in their organization. There were many keys to making this venture successful, one of the key drivers, though, was having a shared vision of the world made that made for an easy introductory conversation.

A quick glance at RMMFI’s site tells you three things: the team is focused on learning, lending and coaching. Right away, we saw two areas of shared vision: learning and coaching.  Part of what I love and enjoy about Rally is our commitment to being thought leaders in our space as well as challenging ourselves with new and innovative ideas.  This translated well to RMMFI’s goal of teaching their clients about transforming dreams into a business plan. Similarly, both groups valued learning which provided both parties the ability to teach one another and also share and adapt ideas. During our project kickoff, we were fortunate to have the talented Rachel Weston, Rally’s Director of Services, facilitate this meeting. The RMMFI team was so enamored with the way she facilitated the kickoff that they took more notes on the Scrum process than the actual project! The RMMFI team takes a systems based approach to helping their clients improve their businesses – akin to what our Professional Services team does when they are engaged – drive client success through business transformation.

Another interesting outcome was RMMFI’s willingness to adopt Agile principles into their business. Not only were flip charts and Post-It notes a fun way to collaborate, but using key Agile principles like constantly prioritizing the team’s backlog and teaching their clients to focus on the highest priority items in their businesses helped increase visibility into the work being done and also opened new avenues for knowledge transfer. As a shameless plug, the project was run in an Agile fashion which was a very effective way to get RMMFI’s data model up and running quickly.  

Finally, the team was also fortunate to have Rally’s own Salesforce.com Administrator, Rich McGuire, volunteer some of his time to guide the team through the Salesforce.com cloud. His expertise at the keyboard and affable personality quickly made him a team favorite. All this combined with his leadership in the local Salesforce.com User Group, we were able to continue the development effort by leveraging the development community at large who were also excited about the opportunity to pitch in.

At the outset of any projects, there are countless roadblocks, impediments and challenges that can derail any effort. Having good team chemistry through similar beliefs, actions and values – while not a surefire recipe for success – certainly helps pave the road to success.

Find a partner:

Finally, you should know this project involved partnership with other firms to get this done. Aptly nicknamed Michael “S’ Force, from Salesforce.com in Denver, has been a critical resource to help RMMFI all the way to the finish line. In addition, the folks from Application Experts, other Salesforce.com partners and members of the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado are moving in to help RMMFI operate, scale and maintain the Salesforce solution beyond launch. You know, it really does take a community to make these things work. Thank you everyone for your help.

The partnership with RMMFI is a great example of Rally’s move toward skill-based volunteering as part of our larger social mission that includes the forming Rally Foundation and our recent certification as a B Corporation. As an Entrepreneur Foundation company in Colorado, we use many of the resources available from the Entrepreneur’s Foundation to help us build a great corporate social responsibility program. In addition, the folks at Intersector Partners, were invaluable in helping us set-up a great working relationship with this young and amazingly effective non-profit.

Have you thought about your own social mission and the steps you’re taking to move that mission forward? One great way to build momentum is to seek out partnerships that provide opportunities and rewards for all involved. We are reaping those rewards in skills development, recruiting great folks and building intrinsic motivations through working towards a purpose. 2010 has been a stepping stone year and we are now primed for another big step in 2011.

Is corporate social responsibility something you care about? How are you making this a strategic part of your business?

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, Executive Director for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and CTO at Rally Software Development.