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

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.

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.

On Wednesday, I received a copy of Colin Beavan’s book called No Impact Man.   I owe a big thank you to Michael Mah of QSM Associates for the gift.  Michael and I have talked together at numerous Agile and Rally events over the past four years.  His work has been instrumental at proving the benefits of Agile by benchmarking Agile projects against their database of 7500 projects.  He has clearly seen me talk about my personal quest to get my family’s carbon and environmental footprint down, as well as our work at Rally on our corporate footprint.

My take away: As you share your personal or professional vision with others, it becomes easier for them to help you attain it. It is a wonderful reinforcing loop.  Thanks again Michael.

(Click on Book to see at Amazon)

This is a book about Colin and his family, who live in New York City, and how they lived for a year with a zero environmental footprint, not just a zero carbon footprint.  I have broken the cover on the Introduction and the first chapter.  It looks like a great and funny read.  Based on my Amazon search, there is even a movie/DVD on the book.

Here are some Chapter titles, to give you a bit of the feel:

• What you think when you find your Life in the Trash
• If Only Pizza Didn’t come on Paper Plates
• Conspicuous Nonconsumption

I look forward to finishing the book on my next plane trip, which is coming in two weeks to the Oracle Open World/Java One/Oracle Developer’s Conference.  I am speaking there on the “Linchpins for Scaling Software Agility.” This talk is on Wednesday morning in the San Francisco Hilton, right before Ted Farrell.  Please join us both as we explore the needs and tools for team hyper-productivity.

I have a reason for liking Bob Payne. Bob has empathy and a true love for giving back. That resonates with some of what we are trying to do here in Boulder. Rally, as a B Corporation, has expressly created a charter about giving back to the community: 1% equity giveback, 1% employee volunteer hours (over 2500/year in the last two years) and a number of other local not for profit initiatives. For Bob and us, adopting Agile has  been an important component in how will pull our empathy and our software skills together. With Agile, we seek to deliver feasible, effective, desirable solutions in our complex world. And reaching beyond our corporate walls to deliver that desirability catapults us to being truly empathic in our solutions.

When you meet Bob, you immediately get what “giving back” and empathy is about in his Agile work and beyond. Bob is always looking for new ways to bring Agile to our community and the greater community: our complex world. Out of his own interest in giving back to the Agile community, Bob set up his Agiletoolkit podcasts site. A gift for all of us. At the recent ADP West conference, Bob was there with his sound setup.  Bob took interest in Rally’s Agile Zen acquisition when interviewing Ryan Martens. And I  had the great fun of talking about Seth Godin’s book “Linchpin” that both Bob and I had read.

In this post, I’m so honored to have the opportunity to turn the tables on Bob and be the interviewer.

“Bob, what got you started recording your Agiletoolkit podcasts?”

I began recording the Agiletoolkit podcasts in 2005 after hearing several interesting podcasts and wondering if anyone would be interested in a podcast about Agile. I had always been a gadget person so fiddling with recording equipment and microphones was a natural for me. In fact, I now also have an iPhone App for the podcasts.

I love having the conversations and the podcast gave me an excuse/push to have conversations with people that I might not connect with in the halls at a conference.  A good example of that was when someone said to me, “You have to talk to this guy Arlo.” Without that introduction via the podcast I am sure I would not know Arlo Belshee as well as I do now.

While I am by nature gregarious, I do not search out “networking opportunities”. The podcasts have forced me into a new comfort zone that includes a lot more people from the community than I would have connected with through normal channels.  While I hope people appreciate and benefit from the podcasts, I do them for myself.  That affects the style of the podcasts. Since I am not trying to be polished or create an edited product, the podcasts have a more natural/comfortable feel.  I just wish I said “UM” less and a was little more polished on my delivery. But…I am who I am and it is what it is.

“How did you get into Agile philanthropy?”

Agile philanthropy started as a way of trying to meld my passion for doing good in the world with my passion for agile methods.  Using the power that is evident in the agile community to do great things is one of the goals of Agile Philanthropy.  Ideally we will get to the point that this movement is self-sustaining. But we are really just starting out on this journey.  I hope that I can grow the movement in the direction of local chapters doing work for local not for profits. Right now everyone is very busy and I am the bottleneck.  We are currently working with Mano a Mano and Haiti Partners. And, I would love to have people with a passion for a particular cause to contact me and start up their own chapter.

“What about your other philanthropic interests?”

I am very interested in local sustainable food, economic development and social justice. I volunteer in my kids’ schools quite a bit.  Most recently, I built incubators with the kids and hatched chickens and worked with the teachers to incorporate that into the curriculum. I have been working to get local food into the schools; to create school gardens; and, to relax the laws in Washington DC as they pertain to the keeping of bees and hens. Most of my other work is more directly related to the work I do in Agile Philanthropy.

“When did you start the Mano a Mano project work and what have you and your yearly teams accomplished at the Agile conferences?”

Seems like forever but we introduced Mano a Mano three years ago when the conference was in DC.  I was running the development lab in the basement and hoped that I could get some real work done in the lab that would do some good.  After that, I tried to make it more formal and improve what we have done for them each year.  They have been very appreciative and very patient with us since I am learning as I go with this process.

To date, we have moved them onto a Content Management Platform and developed their iPhone optimized donation page.  Most importantly, I am happy that I have connected Mano a Mano with David Hussman and a number of other volunteers in the Twin Cities that are helping out on a regular basis.  Wayne Simacek showed up for an event that Jeff Patton and Ed Kraay were holding to help Mano a Mano define their web strategy and ended up staying on as a volunteer member of their IT staff.

It is that kind of leverage that I hope to bring by connecting the two communities.

“What do you have in store for us at the Agile2010 conference?”

For the Agile2010 Conference, I am working again with the UX stage to do an Extreme Makeover for the Mano a Mano web presence.  We hope to be able to work on their information architecture and site design to improve the impact of the message that Mano a Mano is putting out. We are looking for volunteers to come by the LiveAid lab and help with the effort (hint, hint).

I also hope to get people interested in replicating this model for not for profits that they are passionate about.

You can do this too

To end this post, I want to thank Bob for the example he sets for all of us. I also want to emphasize Bob’s call to action to get engaged locally. You can do this through your existing local Agile group. Or, you can create a new group with an express charter to give back to the community. Recently Brad Feld here in Boulder wrote about the “Boulder New Technology Meetup” event that supported over 300 people engaged with 20 local non-profits. And here at Rally, we are marching along with Bob philanthopically working to give back: supporting  Intercambrio, donating time to local non-profits (Community Food Share and Growing Gardens) and working with the Salesforce Foundation.

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down to breakfast with David Douglas, co-author of Citizen Engineer, and Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers without Borders.  It was great to get them both to meet and discuss the need for global, citizen engineers in this increasingly complex and interconnected world.  If you are an engineer and you have not seen or read David and Greg Papadopoulos’  handbook for socially responsible engineering, then you are missing a great picture of the future of engineering driven by purpose and the question “why?”.

To put it simply as possible, Citizen Engineers are the connection point between science and society – between pure knowledge and how it is used.  Citizen Engineers are techno-responsible, environmentally responsible, economically responsible, socially responsible participants in the engineering community.

- Citizen Engineer

I happened to catch Bernard on the way to speak to the National Academy of Engineering on “Engineering Sustainability in the Face of Natural Hazards.”  This brought us to the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.  If you buy the tenents of the Citizen Engineer, then an engineer would be the spokesperson for BP in a situation like this.  In that role, the Citizen Engineer would talk about the situation and help educate the public on the implications of technology of deep water drilling.  At breakfast, this conversation gained a bunch of energy and stimulated me to explore this idea more completely.

Based on my experience and ideas contained in the Citizen Engineer, I believe we need to create more Citizen Engineers. If this happens, we can jump quickly past the island of blame and towards faster learning and more constructive solutions. By moving to a more visible, open and collaborative discourse, we can work together to address these global and complex difficulties.  So, my new favorite phrase is, “What would the Citizen Engineer do?”

In a world of increasing complexity, accidents happen.  This accident is a tragedy with 11 dead and 17 injured in an explosion that created the worst oil spill in the history of the United States.  Let’s start the clock over on these events and explore what a Citizen Engineer would do.

Managing the Gulf Coast Oil Spill, the Citizen Engineer way

It is April 20, just after the blow out. The Citizen Engineer, holding the title Chief Engineer at the company, was notified immediately by email, text and phone.  Right away, she started a number of things in parallel. First, her office took control and governance of the situation and began acting as the general contractor for the accident. There were four fronts to work on:

NASA photo taken May 24 - from web site http://2010gulfoilspill.com/

• Root cause of explosion and rig stability
• Continuing leaks
• Spill clean-up at sea
• Spill clean-up on land

This Chief Engineer’s office placed lead engineers on all these fronts, but to illustrate the point of our story, we will focus only on efforts to stop the continuing leaks.

In the first 24 hours, her team classified the accident as a complex situation, beyond the solution scope of past accidents. It was classified as complex due to the depth of water, pressure, size and number of leaks and the state of the well including the stuck drilling rods.  It was clear that relief wells would be the correct long-term fix, but they were months away.  As a result, her team quickly realized that this complex situation required them to learn as fast as possible from as wide group of people and as many experiments as possible. Simply reaching to internal or known experts of past solutions in shallower, more straight-forward situations would be fine in a complicated situation, but the pre-conceived solutions could actually hurt in this situation. After meeting her response team on-site, she launched the following parallel efforts:

1. Opened communications to the world via Internet to communicate video and known conditions of the accident including live underwater video feeds, movies of experiments and well configurations.
2. Called for counter-measures ideas and technologies from the petroleum engineering community with special requests to Norway and Brazil, the two leading countries with deep water well expertise.
3. Set a daily cadence for coordinating status and learning inside her team.
4. Pulled well experts from their partners, Halliburton and Transocean to staff her disaster response team.
5. Procured the submarines and well capping equipment for these depths.
6. Developed a model of the underwater site to make communication about the situation more clear.
7. Authorized the drilling of relief wells for long-term containment.

By opening communication of the situation to the world and inviting engineering help via the Internet, her team encouraged a crowdsourcing and expert sourcing approach to the problem.  As a result, they quickly received estimates on the amount of oil leaking from scientists who were familiar with measuring flows simply based on the video feeds.  Having understood the large magnitude of this flow, the response team was able to garner more dollars to expedite experiments based on simple, back-of-the-napkin estimates of costs due to fines and clean-up that would accumulate each day the well leaked.

Simultaneously, the web site was collecting potential countermeasures from petroleum as well as civil and aeronautical engineers from around the world.  These countermeasures were filtered by the web team and small groups of response team engineers were doing quick research, experiments and models to boil up the most feasible and effective ones. A web-based social media voting and comment system was allowing outside engineers to validate their thinking.  As the most effective countermeasures emerged, the team started to describe experiments necessary to learn how to evaluate the valid sets of potential solutions. Using their growing resources, the response team launched multiple experiments using models and simulations to accelerate their Orient-Observe-Decide-Act loops. Based on what they understood, they took a set-based approach to running these experimental solutions under the sea.

At the end of the first 24-hour cycle, they were clear on the first three underwater efforts.  These efforts were quick, easy and non-destructive to other efforts. Within the next three days, their first experiments did not attempt to slow the leak, but they learn much more about the actual situation of the undersea drill rig, the actual leak size and mix of gas and oil. This data allowed them to update their models and again narrow their choices, as well as feed the root cause and leak containment teams some valuable facts. They were learning and now major equipment was starting to arrive at the site.  They chose to work on the quickest solutions that had the highest estimated effectiveness and least likelihood to ruin the well site for further efforts. All of these models, experiments, and solutions sets were published on the web site in real-time.  The web site formed the basis for governmental and public communication updates as well kept the worldwide crowd of paid and volunteer engineers in the loop.

This learning-first approach led to some quick wins that started to slow the leaks only 10 days after the accident and fully contained it 14 days later.  There was now an estimated 200,000 barrels in the water.  Her attentions turned to other teams. One had the long-term, relief well underway with an estimate of 2 more months to completely contain the band-aided well from other leaks. The results of the response teams efforts kept the total spill size to less than the 250,000 barrels spilled by the Valdez in 1989 and less than the 7 million barrels spilled during Katrina. The Chief Engineer’s teams had used all the best thinking and resources from around the world to narrow to a short-term fixes very quickly.

To conceptually “pay back” the world of volunteers and future deep sea oil teams, the problem sheets, experiment results and retrospective meeting notes are all freely available on the corporate web site.  This site and content are open and shared with the world in an open source manner.  These notes provide data for future Chief Engineering teams to reference during future accidents.  They also provide an engineering case study and market data for equipment suppliers to the petroleum industry to help make these kind of efforts safer in the future. They know that by working fast and leveraging all the world’s resources, they directly attacked the highest economical, ecological and social risk quickly.

Are you a Citizen Engineer?

Things are changing, as we are rightfully blurring the lines between economic, social and environmental responsibility.  Everyone is having to become more responsible to the triple bottom line.  In this new world, the Citizen Engineer needs to be responsible to technology, ecology, society and economics.  In many cases, the Citizen Engineer must acknowledge the difference between problems and difficulties. Problems have answers, but for the difficulties we can do nothing but try to address it in our increasingly large-scale, interconnected and complex world.

Who knows if this approach would lead to a smaller spill in the future, but it would certainly lead to faster learning in the next set of accidents.

How does your engineering team behave during your organization’s accidents?

Ryan Martens is a civil engineer, founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

We compiled our carbon footprint data for 2009, and the CO2 per 100 paying users continues to decline.  In 2008, we emitted about 8.2 tons of CO2  per 100 users.  In 2009, that number dropped to about 7.8 tons of CO2 per 100 users. (We include building utilities, employee commuting, air travel, IT, hosted operations and SaaS vendors in our total carbon calculation)

Unfortunately, the total tons for our business and tons per employees continues to increase as we are growing in both employees, offices and people that travel on airplanes.  In 2009, we expanded the use of virtualization (VMWare), HD videoconferencing (Lifesize), desktop videoconferencing (both Google and Skype) and located more of our sales and field services employees into their territories.

As we look to 2010, we are beginning to work with our landlord to do longer term planning with regard to solar options for our Boulder facility.  We are also making major upgrades to our hosted operations and testing/staging platforms to support our growth and the growing mission critical nature of our application.  I expect our total CO2 to increase, our CO2 per employee to flatten and CO2 per 100 users to continue to decline as users, employees, airline miles and servers all go up in 2010.

Some of the e-waste collected at our recycling fair

To end on bright note, we ran our electronic recycling fair again.  This year 8 pallets of CRT, TV, computers, servers and amplifiers left our offices and homes headed again for local recycling at Luminous Recycling in Denver.  Total weight of the 8 pallets was 3,984 pounds. This year we did it around St. Patrick’s day and held a Biggest-Loser-style competition in our game room with green beer on tap.  Though the race was tight between one of our engineers, an accountant and our CFO, I am proud to announce that engineering team of Mike and Susan won the competition this year with over 450 pounds of e-waste diverted to local recycling.

To read more about our carbon footprint, you can read my post and comments from 2009.