Agile Development Blog

There are other conferences that cover Agile software development, but the Agile 20xx show reigns supreme. At nearly 2000 attendees from around the world, this year’s show is happening at Walt Disney World in Orlando.  (It was moved there after the flood in Nashville.) For the first time, three of the major analyst firms (and as a result 5 of  the key analysts who cover Agile and ALM) are attending the conference – Forrester, Gartner and IDC.

Rally coaches, sales and marketing folk at booth setup

As a result of the show’s success, it has become the most significant market rhythm in our industry.  So this week, we announced a few things:

• Rally Software Extends Agile ALM Platform to Meet the Unique Needs of Global Organizations – New customization options, full traceability with build and source code, and sharing with corporate dashboards create a single source of record for progress and quality
• Rally Software Extends Visualization of AgileZen Kanban Board – New non-profit program offers a 50% discount on leading visual project collaboration tool
• Innovation Games Company Announces Integration with Rally Software – The leader in serious games for business brings customers improved collaboration and prioritization capabilities
• Tasktop Introduces Agile Planner for Eclipse – New product enables Agile planning from the IDE and integrates multi-vendor Agile ALM solutions

I am speaking tomorrow on PDCA: Moving Beyond Simple Inspect and Adapt. (Thurs 9:00 a.m. in A-1). Other Rally speakers remaining this week are:

Get your Rally cap

• Former Rally developer turned Rally technical account manager turned Rally coach Chris Browne speaks Wednesday on The Art of the Hackathon (Weds 15:30 – 17:00 in Asia 3).
• Rally coaches Alan Atlas and John Martin speak Thursday on “Your Team, Your Freedom, Your Responsibility” (Thurs 15:30-17:00 in Asia 3).

Follow the news from the show on Twitter at #Agile2010. Come see us at the booth and get a Rally and Deliver ballcap. Or let us know if you’re not at the show and want us to send you one (send name and address to kcaraway@rallydev.com).

Ryan Martens is an organic farmer, founding board member of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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

1. 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.
2. Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
3. 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.
4. Where we were and what was not working
   1. The context at Rally was based on a couple of key concepts:
      1. Core Values, Core Purpose, Sandbox and BHAG from Jim Collins
      2. 3 to 5 Quarterly Rocks, success criteria and Scoreboards from Gazelles
      3. Rock team structures  – cross departmental and story based
      4. Facilitated, highly collaborative cross-departmental meeting of 30+ managers and above
   2. What we noticed
      1. Rock work as a second or third job
      2. Wisdom of the Crowds to help fix over-reaction and group think
      3. Too much on the fly, not enough backlog grooming
      4. Highly critical, non-cross departmental initiatives were de-prioritized
      5. ORID process added to keep from jumping too solutions, but the data was not visible enough
5. What we decided to do about this:
   1. 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”.
   2. Our initial experiments with A3 process the year prior — Working with our Ops team and product marketing teams on problem solving using real data
   3. First quarter — How we kick-started Rally’s company-wide adoption of PDCA . I describe our “Mountain Team” and their transitional role.
      1. Defining Rally’s True North
      2. Creating our second level tree with current and needed metrics
      3. Socializing these throughout the company seeking feedback in anticipation of our annual and quarterly planning
      4. Started new experiments based on quarterly planning decisions
   4. Next Quarter – Review new experiments, discussed learning and drive A3’s into the planning process
   5. Mid-course adjustment by Mountain team, in middle of the quarter – What we discovered working and not working
      1. The rocks were all dependent on each other.
      2. Had to run Rock of Rock team meetings to steer to a final solution
      3. Coordinated release planning would have
   6. 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:
      1. 1. Taking company-wide feedback into our Annual planning to collaboratively drive cross-department A3 creation around each branch of the tree
         2. 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.
   7. 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:
      1. Quarterly rocks moved to a world of pre-defined from developed on the fly
      2. Quarterly planning moved from ad-hoc based on yesterday’s weather to more programmed based on True North and meeting the target metrics
      3. Strategic planning worked to validate annual True North in the context of long-term planning, shared vision development, cross-boundary collaboration and larger systems
6. What we learned and what you should do about it
   1. 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.
      1. Year 0 – Introduce Lean thinking (A3 in our case)
         
      2. Year 1 – Introduce PDCA (Novice)
      3. Year 2 – Invest or abandon (Your choice)
         1. A3 is now the language for problem solving
         2. Making sure we are solving the right problem (aka slowing down to speed up)
   2. Do not have a overall guidance team steering the continued PDCA process – it is owned by the “team”
   3. 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”
   4. Where to start – The Strategy A3 an exercise
   5. What is next? – We call it the Innovative or Lean Organization. Seeing large systems, collaborating across boundaries and creating your reality.
      
7. Point of View – Use PDCA to move your planning horizon out and as the principle governing mechanism for organizations in continuous flow.
8. Call to Action – Introduce the language of A3’s through problem solving or Strategy A3’s
9. Benefits — Help build a company of problem solvers to focus your efforts on the critical few things.
10. Where I hope you go with this: Great companies build great software, great experiences and work on creating win/win scenarios.
    

And the number #1 Characteristic of an Agile Organization is…

“The Commitment to be Great”

The ability to make the commitment to be more than just good comes from the ability to drive a culture of discipline that balances the metrics of profitability and reputation.  Hopefully you have seen and heard that message come through in the other items in our top 10 list; I applied these concepts from Jim Collins’ in “Good to Great.”

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance.  Greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”

In the world of software development, an agile organization does not settle for having agile stuck in ghettos.  An agile organization makes the commitment to go up the learning curve and blow past amateurism.  As Jim describes this takes an organization that can increase the discipline to support increasing levels and scale of agility. Discipline to:

• Regularly plan at the five levels (daily, iteration, release, roadmap and long-term vision)
• Regularly make and meet the commitments you make based on a sustainable pace
• Regularly inspect the progress & metrics and adapt the plans at each level
• Make decisions based on the data, culture, and purpose

As Alan talks about at Amazon, it was just the OK from management that was needed.  As Israel talks about at BMC, it was a Social Contract.   You know what kind of commitment you need at your organization to scale agile.  You need to get it to really improve and make your transition happen.  Please, don’t settle for a weak commitment.  It leads to isolated adoption,  ghettos, and a slow, muddling adoption process.  Scaling agility beyond just the development teams can be simple and rewarding, as long as you start with the commitment.

Here is a quick refresher of the complete Top 10  list:

#1 Commitment to be great; disciplined culture and metrics

#2 Creating Your Own Reality and Corporate Vision

#3 Quality and Faster

#4 Personal Flexibility and Rhythm

#5 Bottom-up and Top-down Decision Making

#6 Collaborative and Smart

#7 Contributing to the Community and Maintaining a Profitable Company

#8 Sustainable and Successful

#9 Servant and Leader

#10 Work/Life Balance and Consistent Delivery

I hope you have enjoyed our series on the top 10 Characteristics of an Agile organization, it was a pleasure doing this with Jean, Anne and Grant.

Let us know if we missed something?