In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created with 17 signatories from around the world. Following on the heels of the first XP conference in Sardinia in 2000, the Manifesto fired its shot of agility across the Waterfall bow. A year later, at XP/Agile Universe 2002, I found myself standing at a folding table with Janet Danforth of Facilitator4Hire. We were selling facilitation services to the members of the Agile community gathered at a Courtyard by Marriott in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Approximately 80-100 people had come together in that steamy summer venue to continue Agile discussions and to define ongoing growth of methodologies, practices and frameworks.
Where we were
At the same time I was at my folding table in Lincolnshire in 2002, Ryan Martens was at a whiteboard in Boulder, Colorado. Ryan was brainstorming ideas about how he could use Agile practices to create a Software as a Service platform in the Agile domain. His goal? To provide zero-waste, low-carbon emissions applications and services for this growing, vibrant community.
In 2003, the Agile community gathered in Salt Lake City for the Agile Development Conference. This was my first time presenting at an Agile conference. Janet Danforth and I conducted a workshop: Collaboration 4 Agile Projects. And, unbeknownst to me, Ryan was also in Salt Lake City for his first Agile conference. As Ryan was busy engaging vendors about how they were supporting the adoption of Agile, I was busy networking with Agile thought leaders and helping to found “The Freaking Flock” (you’ll have to ask me about that in person!) Our paths were set and Agile was on the move.
Fast Forward to 2011
Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.
The Agile 2011 conference is an exciting one for both Agile and Rally. We are pleased once again to be a Title Sponsor of the conference. This year, August 8-12, Rally has 11 speaking sessions on the wonderfully vast and diverse program.
We’ve also participated behind the scenes in advance of the conference as producers, co-producers and reviewers for various conference stages. And, once again, we’ll have a booth where you can come to meet our Agile coaches, talk with our technical gurus, and see the latest that is happening with Rally’s Agile ALM platform and services. Plus, you won’t want to miss our special commemorative activity at the booth this year. Stay tuned to the blog and follow our Twitter hashtag #roadtoagility for more details on how you can participate with us!
Going back to my history of Agile and Rally and the conferences
Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.
From the folding table to now
Some things have changed in Rally’s Agile journey. We’ve grown from a 20-person company in 2004 to over 250 people and counting. Ryan is now the head of the office of the CTO. Richard is now the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Brad is our Vice President of Field Operations. And I am an Agile Fellow in the Office of the CTO.
From a Manifesto, a whiteboard, folding tables, and a single speaker to title sponsorship with multiple speakers, producers, reviewers, and booth presence in a true exhibit hall at a conference with over 1,600 attendees, we’ve indeed come a long way!
Jean Tabaka is a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka
On April 21 in Atlanta, the Lean Software and Systems Consortium will come together for its second US conference. Last year’s event in Miami was “amazing” according to Jean. So this year, Rally is exhibiting, I am speaking while Jean and Aaron are running the open space on Friday. The price per attendee goes up by $250 on March 31st, so if you do intend to go, REGISTER now.
At our booth, Rally will be demonstrating its product support for highly-visible Kanban, WIP/Cumulative Flow reports, and cycle-time metrics. Join Alan Atlas, Jean Tabaka, Aaron Sanders and Craig Langenfeld in our booth.
I will be presenting an experience report titled: PDCA: Beyond Simple Inspect and Adapt. On spring break this week, I’ve been thinking more about the details of my talk. Here is my abstract and outline for those of you who might consider attending:
Lean and Kanban focus on practices of continuous flow of product delivery. Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a Lean discipline that moves beyond inspect and adapt of Agile team-level processes. At a corporate level, PDCA provides guidance for strategy as well as problem-solving work. In 2009, I led Rally’s move to PDCA for the company’s strategy process at both the annual and quarterly levels. My primary guide was Pascal Dennis’ “Getting the Right Things Done”. In this experience report, I share Rally’s PDCA first year of adoption: where we started, how this impacted our corporate behaviors, and where we are now. I want to share Rally’s story to compel participants to embrace PDCA and get good at it. I ask each participant to come with its organization’s #1 goal and success criteria. I will close with a planning A3 exercise from Pascal’s book .
Outline
What brought me here—background on why I am passionate about sharing my organization’s overall Lean story including the addition of PDCA, A3’s and concurrent set-based development. This talk focuses on PDCA as the critical step in increasing structure and discipline in strategy execution.
Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
Benefits — Mature your strategic planning and execution environment to handle the complexity of increasing speed, agility and scale and to gain alignment, pull and innovation.
Where we were and what was not working
The context at Rally was based on a couple of key concepts:
Core Values, Core Purpose, Sandbox and BHAG from Jim Collins
3 to 5 Quarterly Rocks, success criteria and Scoreboards from Gazelles
Rock team structures – cross departmental and story based
Facilitated, highly collaborative cross-departmental meeting of 30+ managers and above
Highly critical, non-cross departmental initiatives were de-prioritized
ORID process added to keep from jumping too solutions, but the data was not visible enough
What we decided to do about this:
Explanation of PDCA — A brief overview of PDCA in general and then specifically what I used as guidance from the Pascal Dennis book, “Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution”.
Our initial experiments with A3 process the year prior — Working with our Ops team and product marketing teams on problem solving using real data
First quarter — How we kick-started Rally’s company-wide adoption of PDCA . I describe our “Mountain Team” and their transitional role.
Defining Rally’s True North
Creating our second level tree with current and needed metrics
Socializing these throughout the company seeking feedback in anticipation of our annual and quarterly planning
Started new experiments based on quarterly planning decisions
Next Quarter – Review new experiments, discussed learning and drive A3’s into the planning process
Mid-course adjustment by Mountain team, in middle of the quarter – What we discovered working and not working
The rocks were all dependent on each other.
Had to run Rock of Rock team meetings to steer to a final solution
Coordinated release planning would have
Final quarter – We worked to expand the plan. We took the Mountain team’s True North and feedback to drive our PDCA for Rally’s Annual Corporate planning by:
Taking company-wide feedback into our Annual planning to collaboratively drive cross-department A3 creation around each branch of the tree
Mountain Team retrospective over the course of year 1 that helped create a planning rock team. The Mountain team’s role as a transition team ended.
Year 2 – Doubling down our efforts to go from amateurs to intermediates —Changing our process to institutionalize A3’s and PDCA as our strategy execution approach:
Quarterly rocks moved to a world of pre-defined from developed on the fly
Quarterly planning moved from ad-hoc based on yesterday’s weather to more programmed based on True North and meeting the target metrics
Strategic planning worked to validate annual True North in the context of long-term planning, shared vision development, cross-boundary collaboration and larger systems
What we learned and what you should do about it
The cycle of adoption is a year, quarterly cycles work to improve the process, but it is hard to make leaps on a quarterly basis.
Year 0 – Introduce Lean thinking (A3 in our case)
Year 1 – Introduce PDCA (Novice)
Year 2 – Invest or abandon (Your choice)
A3 is now the language for problem solving
Making sure we are solving the right problem (aka slowing down to speed up)
Do not have a overall guidance team steering the continued PDCA process – it is owned by the “team”
Putting pressure on the organization to get more clear about our economic models to mature from “Theory-based decision making toward the right solution,” Now “Data-driven decision making toward the right problem”
Where to start – The Strategy A3 an exercise
What is next? – We call it the Innovative or Lean Organization. Seeing large systems, collaborating across boundaries and creating your reality.
Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
Call to Action – Introduce the language of A3’s through problem solving or Strategy A3’s
Benefits — Help build a company of problem solvers to focus your efforts on the critical few things.
Where I hope you go with this: Great companies build great software, great experiences and work on creating win/win scenarios.
Are there other questions you’d like to see answered in Rally’s experience report on Plan-Do-Check-Act? I look forward to seeing you at Lean SSC.
For those unaware, the Agile Alliance states that “The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice make them, in the opinion of the Award Committee, people others in the field should emulate.”
Rally’s newest Coach Aaron Sanders facilitated this 90 minute sessions in three blocks: (1) Q&A with the award winners, (2) Q&A with the audience and (3) reflections by the award winners.
Here are some of my favorite insights shared by the panel:
Us versus them – beat them is a human fear response
Middle managers are often scared
People who are advocating more then asking – are hard to build trust with
Next for me is “Whole Company” and Governance strategies
(Last year’s winner Kenji was not at the conference, but you can read a great interview with him on Aaron’s blog - Interview with Kenji Hiranabe – 2008 Pask Award Winner – it gives you more of the flavor of the actual session)
It was great to see that they all had meaningful answers to the question regarding how the award had affected them. Three cheers to Brian Marick for idea and Three Cheers to the awardees for making something out of it! The highly interested members of the audience included Jean Tabaka, Esther Derby, Rachel Davies and about 20 other folks.
If you have not been to an Agile Conference, this kind of intimate gathering is common and why so many people come back year over year. It’s sessions like this that have helped Agile 2009 become such a wonderful mix of new and old, small and large as well as academic and professional.
I look forward to seeing Simon Baker & Gus Power from the UK and David Hussman, the newest Gordon Pask award winners, using their award to extend their influence on the industry. Congratulations gentlemen and Congratulations to the team of volunteers that put on another strong Agile Conference. See you in 2010!
Last week my fellow blogger Jean Tabaka spoke at the Bay APLN about one of her more controversial topics – the 12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes. Check out this great post from Aaron Sanders that distills her presentation.
My personal favorite is #11 – Revert to Traditional
Aaron says about #11, “Change is hard. Hit the threshold where this sucks. Revert back to old ways of doing business.”
In this statement, Jean is referring to Kathy Sierra’s work on “How to be an Expert” and what Kathy calls the “Suck Threshold.” Jean has seen first-hand that many teams can slip into complacency and ultimately fall back below the “Suck Threshold.” At that point, they may give up and revert back to traditional process. Classically we see this happen right around 1 1/2 years because too many of the other adoption failure modes pulled the team or teams down.
But there is good news…
I highly recommend reading Aaron’s post to determine what failure mode might be working against you. Once you can name them, you can take the necessary steps to address them.
Special thanks goes to Aaron, who is joining Rally as a coach in July – we are all looking forward to seeing him at our quarterly coaches off-site. And also thanks to César Idrovo and David Chilcott from BayAPLN for their help with the talk and our visit to the Bay!
RallyDev.com
Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.
Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.
Last week at Agile 2009, I attended a 
Agile Adoption Failure Modes. Check out this 
