Agile Development Blog

We’re looking for a Director of HR

Rally is proud of its continued growth since our inception 8 years ago. In the last 2 years, we’ve practically doubled in size. And now we need help sustaining our pride in our company, our culture, and our people. We need a great, unique Director of HR.

Rally Looks Different

Taking its lead from Jim Collins “Good to Great”, Rally truly lives by its core values. For us, our Director of HR would be both an internal and external model and supporter of these values: Create your own reality; Respect people; Make and meet commitments; Give back to the community; Theory-driven decision making; Sustainable work-life balance.

We’re proud of our awards!

Named the Best Company to Work For in Colorado in 2009 and 2010, and ranked the #6 Best Places to Work in the nation from Outside Magazine in 2010, Rally offers a highly collaborative culture and work-life balance that attracts top talent. Our product gets plenty of accolades too, winning four consecutive Jolt Awards (the software industry’s equivalent of the Oscars®) in our category 2006-2009 and recently recognized by industry analyst Forester Research as “offering the best combination of capability and strategy of Agile ALM tools.”

Agile organizations look different

From the start, Rally has prided itself in being a truly Agile organization in the software industry. What does it mean to be a Director of HR in an Agile company? Here are a few characteristics of Agile we value:

• Servant Leadership — our management model takes a page out of the Robert Greenleaf approach to leadership: lead by serving and serve by leading. Our Director of HR must be someone who can sustain this environment, mentor others in it, and create professional development opportunities for growth in this management style.
• Self-Organizing Teams — part of being an organization of servant leaders includes a strong belief in the value of self-organizing teams. We eschew command-and-control style management. Rather, we seek insights from teams and turn to them to guide our solutions that align with our corporate vision.
• Emphasis on Teams — Rally embraces a strong culture of collaboration. For us, that means that we value team accomplishments over individualism or heroism. Our HR Director needs to help us guide employees in the value of team ownership and the intrinsic rewards therein.
• De-emphasis on hierarchy — Finally, in our Agile company, we de-emphasize traditional hierarchical organizational structures. Rally is proud of maintaining a fairly flat organization even as we grow upwards of 250 people.

Could This Be You?

So, our Director of HR may look a bit different than you might expect. Still, we are looking for some great solid HR credentials that should look very familiar to you. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you via the career section of our web site. There you will find a detailed job description and other benefit details. If this is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with your friends and with your networks using the “ShareThis” button below or through our LinkedIn post.

Tim Miller is a dropout from the University of Colorado but somehow has two degrees from CU. He keeps sane by playing golf and tennis and is the CEO at Rally Software Development.

After reading the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in January of 2002, Rally really took shape. I am proud of my involvement in the software industry for the last 25 years, but the last 10 have been fantastic thanks to the group pictured below, who came together in February 2001 in Snowbird, UT.

A ten year mark is the perfect time to stop and reflect and the 10-Year Manifesto anniversary is no different.  In this spirit, Dr. Alistair Cockburn, one of the original Manifesto authors, is hosting an open discussion on February 12 with a group of 35 individuals from varied backgrounds in our industry. I am proud to attend and we are proud to be a sponsor of this event.  I look forward to joining in the reflection, discussion and celebration with other attendees at the Snowbird resort. (With these recent storms, the 100+ inches of base and 14″ of fresh snow should make for a great weekend.)

The event theme is “Solved, Solvable, Unsolvable Problems.”  As participants we’ve been challenged to consider the following three questions:

1. What problems in software or product development have we solved (and therefore should not simply keep re-solving)?
2. What problems are fundamentally unsolvable (so therefore we should not keep trying to “solve” them)?
3. What problems can we sensibly address – problems that we can mitigate either with money, effort or innovation? (and therefore, these are the problems we should set our attention to, next.)

What do you think?  What are your answers? What other questions should we be asking of each other? The Agile community needs to be an active part of the anniversary celebration and the conversation it creates. Please take a moment to stop, reflect and make your own contribution to this event. Visit the ‘10-Years of the Agile Manifesto‘ website to join the dialog. You can also post your photos of agile development from the last decade to the event’s Flickr group. Follow and contribute to the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag: #10yrsagile. And, share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

The Agile Manifesto 10th anniversary will continue at the Agile 2011 Conference scheduled for August 7 – 13 in Salt Lake City. Agile 2011 will provide another opportunity for the Agile community to reflect on the Agile Manifesto and how it contributed to software development over the last decade.

Saturday’s Snowbird event marks an amazing 10 years in the software development industry. This is a great opportunity to think about how far we’ve come and what we can accomplish in the next 10 years. What’s on your roadmap for 2021?

Ryan Martens is an active snow shoveler, skier dreaming of skiing at Snowbird this weekend, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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.

As a part of our series on Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level, I have invited our product lead on this project, Catherine Connor, to tell us about her experience in creating Project Stratus. Thank you for the great work and help on this series Catherine.

Project Stratus was conceived over a year ago from numerous customer discovery interviews geared at understanding the challenges of strategic planning with agile execution. From these interviews we started to form an idea of what an agile strategic planning tool could look like, but we also knew that we would need to do serious customer validation before getting to productize a solution.

We’d already selected a disciplined approach to customer validation based on The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steven Blank. Although the book focuses on startups, many of the ideas, such as diligently conducting customer validation and creating a sales roadmap (i.e. a repeatable process to sell your product) can also be applied to new products in existing compagnies. The basic premise of Blank’s approach is that if you solve a problem for customers (called “earlyvangelists”) who are so acutely affected by that problem that they are willing to build a solution themselves, you are more likely to deliver a product that will solve that same problem for many more customers.

Four Steps to the Epiphany © Steven G. Blank

Project Stratus was drastically accelerated in April 2010 at the LeanSSC conference in Atlanta, when one of our customers unveiled the agile product portfolio scheduler application they’d built to solve their own strategic planning needs. Not only did the application visualize where we were heading, it also happened to be built on the Rally Platform. We’d just found our first earlyvangelist.

Four months later, at Agile2010, we privately introduced Project Stratus to a handful of industry analysts and customers to gauge their reaction. Based on their overwhelming excitement, we proceeded in identifying additional earlyvangelists from past customer interactions. An earlyvangelist is like a P1 defect, when you find one, you know right away. These customers are so excited to see a provider like Rally think up a commercially supported solution to the problem they have been trying to solve themselves, they are anxious to guide you, and some are even irritated by the fact that the product is not out yet; when all along we’ve been thinking not to deliver such a thing! I could tell when I first engaged with Paul, Dale, Nina, Christophe and others, that they would be partners in shaping Project Stratus to become a valuable product. The beauty of Blank’s technique is in its reciprocity. We, the solution provider, get to build a product that solves real needs, earlyvangelists get to shape a supported solution to replace their manual solution, and customers get to benefit from their peers’ expertise.

With earlyvangelists on hand, we sat down to define the set of hypotheses to validate. This is an important step to ensure that interviews provide meaningful outcomes. Nothing is more deflating than spending an hour with a customer only to find yourself with no good answer to “exactly what did I learn from this call?” Listing hypotheses is also a great way to communicate to yourself and others in your company what you are trying to find out and what you are purposefully setting aside for another time. This is very much like “theory-based decision making”, one of Rally’s corporate core values.

Since August, we have been incrementally evolving Stratus, one weekly build at a time, diligently validating our hypotheses one at a time.  Earlyvangelists’ real-life experiences combined with our coaches yearning to apply agile and lean principles to the strategic level are informing the direction of Stratus. I feel really good about where Stratus is going.

As an agile product manager who has seen several projects being productized prematurely, I am truly enjoying following Blank’s rigorous Customer Development approach and definitely would recommend it to my product manager comrades. You do need executive support which thankfully Rally provides me. Following Blank’s technique is no small feat however, it is hard and diligent work with no guaranteed productization plans until you pass his customer validation final exam: “you have proven you have understood customer problems, found a set of earlyvangelists and delivered a product that customers want to buy, developed a repeatable and scalable sales process and demonstrated you have a profitable business model.”  Then, and only then, will we graduate to Blank’s customer creation step, aka the delivery of an official Rally offering for Strategic Planning.

The customer validation step for Project Stratus is going full steam. We welcome more earlyvangelists to partner with us in this exciting endeavor. The more input we receive, the more valuable the product will be. If you have strategic planning challenges and a passion for applying agile principles for solving them, I invite you to reach out to us at stratus@rallydev.com. – Catherine Connor

The work done by Steve Blank on this method is fantastic. In addition to Project Stratus, I have used it with our large on-premise customers and with TechStars companies in order to keep from leaping to conclusions and trying to by-pass the customer creation stage. I hope many of you can empathize with the discipline required to do both of these things in the world of product development.

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

Catherine Connor is a Product Manager at Rally Software Development. She focuses on the product manager role in our customers’ agile transformation endeavors.

Our medium fidelity prototype has the bugs shaken out and we’ve ordered 30 T-walls and an overhead power and data grid for our new engineering, operations and support space. To help you and your team down a similar path, I have attached the plans that we had drawn to manufacture our magnetic board walls on wheels. Click on the image for the PDF.

Back in the summer and based my visit to the Standford DSchool, I started talking about the innovations in furniture that I had seen in that space. In Fall, we had a space hackathon with the local team from RightNow and George from the dschool. As a result of that work, we built some T-wall prototypes and started trying different power management strategies.

What was amazing was that the day after we had the T-Walls delivered, a new product development team moved in; as the core engineering teams split from four teams of 9-10 to 7 teams of 3-5 people. It was the perfect validation and a great “earlyvangalist” customer to help us develop our final solution for scale in our new space. (More on “earlyvangalists” on Monday’s blog post – stay tuned.)

Ryan Martens is an epic pass user, CEO of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

In “The Design of Business“, Roger Martin talks about businesses that find an algorithm and just stick with it. They exploit it and never really dare to explore new ideas or ways of doing things. Sort of like a one hit wonder. You just live off the royalties of that one great idea.

What’s a one hit wonder?

My colleague Mark Gammon and I were talking about Martin’s book and this phenomenon and decided it was time for a “One Hit Wonder Friday”. A one hit wonder is an artist, singer, or group who has made a hit, a really big hit, and yet has not been able to do anything else that really grabbed the public’s attention. Given that the one hit wonder Martin describes in his book is one I’ve loved for a while, we decided to kick-off our Friday series with his example. Here’s who we have in mind: someone who has a song pretty well known even though it is quite old. And yet, the artist (okay, that’s a hint, it is one person) never explored or expanded. It turns out he (okay, it’s a male), has been doing okay living off his royalties. But before we reveal further clues about our artist, first back to business.

Are you living off the royalties of your business “one hit wonder”?

Businesses can end up being one hit wonders too. They find that one “song,” that one big idea, or that one good process and believe they have to stick with it in order to be successful. This is the stuff of bureaucracies. The sad fate of business one hit wonders is that they just aren’t built to last. The idea either dies out or is bought out. One thing for sure, with business one hit wonders there is no room for chance or growth; that is too dangerous.

For your business to avoid the doom of a one hit wonder, you’ll have to challenge yourself continuously in process improvement, in product visioning, and in knowledge sharing. You will have to invite the discomfort of exploration and the unknown. Accepting and embracing the ambiguity of whether you will be a hit or not is not easy. But, as in the Agile world, with frequent feedback and delivery in small batches, you can make quick adjustments through heuristics that set you on  your next big hit.

Back to our “One Hit Wonder Friday!”

Here are a few facts about this week’s one hit wonder (thank you Wikipedia):

He’s a Massachusetts boy, born in the 1940′s. He studied music at Boston University (ah, that paid off :-) Using some of the proceeds from his one hit, he landed a farm outside of Petaluma, CA. So all is not bad for our one hit wonder!  The song itself is remarkably recognizable given that it came out back in 1969-1970 and sold over 2 million copies during that time. (Again, what an algorithm to stick with!) To our one hit wonder’s delight, it has been re-made a number of times, including by the great all girl punk band Fuzzbox (Hint: yes, there is a connection between the term fuzzbox and our song.) This is really good stuff :-)

The song itself had a combination of a sort of spiritual and hippie feel using heavy guitars and hand-clapping. Our artist wrote the song in 15 minutes as his own version of what he thought a gospel song could be. And finally, Rolling Stone rates the song #333 in its top 500 songs of all time.

So who is our one hit wonder this week?

Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

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.

I am excited to say that this week we announced, at the Gartner AADI Summit and Agile Development Practices East, the availability of a new service offering and product from Rally. To support this launch and amplify the feedback loops from the community, we are starting a blog series on this topic. All of the blog posts in this series will show up in the blog, but also get linked into a summary page focused on Scaling Agile to the Strategic level (above release level, including roadmap and vision level for products, programs and solutions).

If managing Agile at the strategic level is something you are expert at or struggling with, you will want to follow this series. It is going to be written by a team of folks from Rally including myself, Jean, two internal Coaches at Rally, eighteen external Coaches at Rally and product experts.

In the last year, we have read a ton on strategic execution and lean, blogged on many of those ideas, experimented with talks and exercises and worked with a number of our customers. In addition, we ran our fellow Rallyers through many of these concepts. As a result of this work and the rapid development of our supporting product, code-named “Project Stratus,” we feel that we are ready to offer some value in the form of professional, product and community services to educate, enable and explore these concepts, methods and tools with our customers.

From sharing our experiences, we have learned that managing above the release level, at the roadmap and vision level, is different than project or program-level management. It is NOT:

• as focused on the big epic feature as the desired outcome
• an extension of the integrated agile release train as much as management of flow and contention

These offerings are brand new; we know they will change with more feedback and experience; as a result, they are being released now with less packaging and polish. The service offering starts with a two-day assessment and training effort, but then moves into a custom statement of work. The Project Stratus product offering will remain in preview status for the short term. We assume that focused work with 15 to 20 key customers will shape these solutions for all.

If you think you could be one of those customers, please do not hesitate to contact your account managers, coaches or customer success representatives. We are anxious to share these breakthrough concepts with customers who are willing to co-develop them with us.

With regard to the blog series, we see the following topics getting explored over the next three months:

• Introduction
• Our Theories and Why Project Stratus?
• Our Agile Strategic Planning Service offering
• The making of Project Stratus
• Prediction in Kanban versus Scrum commitment
• Enterprise Kanban and AgileZen
• Others, based on your comments and feedback

If you have topic ideas or comments, please post below. Again, don’t forget to subscribe or share the RSS feed or email feed for the blog to be part of this discussion. We want YOU to participate in this Community of Thinkers!

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

Rally’s ongoing use of hackathons to spur innovation and creativity are highlighted in a new article on Inc., “How to Set Up a Hackathon.” Our own Todd Sheridan, Scrum Master, and Chris Browne, Agile Coach, contributed terrific insights into the benefits, rules and how to best setup successful hackathons. One of the key takeaways from the article is recognizing that hackathon thinking “shouldn’t only extend to product ideas, but to how the company operates internally.” Taking time to step away from everyday issues provides valuable distance that can help stimulate creative thinking.

Hackathons, a time-boxed event used to build prototypes of innovations, are a popular way to spur new ideas and have been employed by companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago we shared Rally’s experience hosting week long culture and space “hackathons” as part of our effort to extend these innovative events beyond their traditional engineering and development contexts. We had an awesome hackathon week, applying the fundamental ideas of urgency and innovation to our own company culture while producing four great projects.

Do you use hackathons in your organization? We’d love to hear about how you’re hacking your products, spaces and culture.

Ryan Martens is a tomatillo salsa maker, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Please help us find qualified candidates for an exciting new opening at Rally’s Boulder headquarters.  With compounding user growth, seven agile teams, four product lines, two development locations, as well as multi-tenant SaaS and on-premise deployments, it is time for us to hire a VP to help us continue to grow and thrive.

We have managed with various folks playing parts of this role over the last seven years, and now we need to add a skilled, servant leader and operator to our senior team to enhance functional management across the software value-delivery chain.

This person will be part of our senior management team and be responsible for all technical engineering and operations. As a peer to our VP of Products and supported by Zach’s four product line managers, you and your teams will collaborate with these managers to advance the product portfolio components and overall strategy.  This person will work with a world-class team of software, systems, operational engineers and scrum masters.   Service Level Agreements (SLA) with customers will measure success in this role with the goal of increasing overall engineering resource development, mentorship and flexibility to meet evolving products, features, and architectural needs.  Our intent is to continue growing this part of the business through organic, development partners and acquisitions.

A major part of personal success in this job comes from thriving in our culture of team collaboration, personal responsibility, high ethics, social give-back and intrinsic motivation.

If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you via the career section of our web site. There you will find a detailed job description as well as other benefit details.  (If you are not quite ready to apply, but want to have a quick confidential conversation with the management team, please send email to vpengops@rallydev.com. No recruiters please).  If this is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with your friends and with your networks using the “ShareThis” button below or through our LinkedIn post.

We are very excited to find the right addition to this agile engineering and operations group.

Ryan Martens is a the CEO of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.