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:
50,000 feet to tell the story of problem/solution
30,000 feet to tell the story of product/market fit
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 2nd-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:
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:
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.
I love games! Especially games that help teams grasp Agile principles and practices. There is nothing like a good game to help build some solid muscle memory around core aspects of how Agile impacts teams and organizations.
In the next couple of months, I have the very good fortune to be involved in several Agile game events. I’m lucky enough to try out new games, bring in some systems thinking and design thinking games, and help others apply games.
I’ve been pretty passionate about collaboration and knowledge flow throughout the decades of my technical life. This passion led me to author Collaboration Explained. Now I value playing with and applying a variety of visioning, planning, and learning models in Agile organizations. My reading has focused on models for individuals and organizations in how they create flow of value in 21st century businesses. For me, there could be no better place than the Agile context in which to apply these models of rich knowledge sharing. Complex Agile organizations need to consider diverse models that can effectively guide how they plan and deliver.
Agile planning helps us scale and mature across the organization
With this in mind, I’m excited to announce a new series about N levels of Agile planning. I’ll be co-authoring the series with my Rally colleagues Ben Carey, Zach Nies and other Rally folks. Ben, Zach and I want to share some of our informal conversations around Enterprise Agile planning, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing. That means we’ll be blogging about various models we think can be useful for capturing and tracking Agile business value up and down the organization. Our suspicion is that useful scaling and maturing models coupled with overall team practices bring great value at a variety of levels within an Enterprise Agile organization.
In this series, we’ll share direct experience in applying our models both within Rally and with Rally customers. That means we’ll share some insights about collections of practices at the various levels of Agile planning. We’ll also provide guidance around the Rally services and tooling we believe support planning in continuously innovative, value-driven organizations. Also, be sure to check out Ryan Martens’s series about Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level. Ryan and others will be providing on-going guidance about Rally’s “Project Stratus” tool for road mapping and other strategic practices specifically for Enterprise Agile beyond Release planning.
Ben, Zach and I don’t believe we are the sole experts on this topic!
We’re exposing our frank conversations in hopes of gaining your reactions, insights and feedback. You probably already know about some of Rally’s existing guidance on Agile planning. We just want to dig a little deeper, play a little more with these perspectives and some new approaches that could help you innovate your own Enterprise Agile adoption. While we do this, we’ll be reporting on how we are experimenting with these models here at Rally in our own practices using our own tools and our own services as well as new practices.
Look for our first blog in the next few days describing the overall model of “Why, How, and What” in positioning the value of Enterprise Agile planning. How many levels of planning will emerge in our exploration, and what will they look like? We aren’t yet prepared to declare in a definitive fashion. Instead, we’ll peek into that together with your input.
Join us as we go into N levels of Agile planning and beyond. We’re looking forward to great dialogue with you through the comments you bring.
Jean Tabakais a crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka
Last Thursday, Ben Carey kicked-off our latest and largest webinar on the topic “How Teams Succeed with Agile Quality and Testing.”
Thank you everyone for the great compliments; a majority of the compliments should go to Ben, Jessica, Bob and the folks from SQE for the quality effort. Thanks to these great folks, it was technically perfect, visually pleasing, entertaining, impacting and backed up by great supporting content. If you missed it, you can see the video reply to this webinar. You can find the supporting content under the Learn Agile part of the Rally web site.
Following that webinar, I saw a twitter post from one of our customers about the meeting they had following our webinar. This “Lunch and Learn” session allowed the team to reflect on what the heard immediately following the webinar.
“Having a post-webinar discussion with our SQA group on the #rallydev seminar. Nicely done @RallyOn & @BenCarey”
This is a great example of self educating on this topic. It is the first of four steps that we recommend in the webinar:
Self-educate and discuss to set the context
Find an external driver for your change to keep from having drifting goals (customer, competitor, benchmark)
Make a commitment as a team to move forward
Find your first practice to adjust and adjust just that one only
If you liked the webinar and content, I encourage you to set up a lunch and learn to view and discus these topics on your team or program. If you are interested in more depth, you might consider our next webinar in the series, Pulling Quality Forward: Agile Testing and Tooling for Embedded Software Development. The live presentation will take place on Wednesday, September 30th at Noon MDT with Zach Nies, VP of Product Development at Rally and Paul Henderson from WindRiver/Intel . You can register on-line and learn more about the details.
I have found the quality topic to be great for team lunches. It is can be a sticking point especially for functionally divided teams and quality has to be owned by the whole team. I encourage you to take advantage of either of these webinars to hold a “lunch and learn” topic for your team. Maybe after your next demo and before your next retrospective.
Here at Rally, we’ve been working hard over the last several months to bring our Agile course materials and presentations into the New Age. We want to have what you might call “truly Agile” course materials and presentations.
What does that look like? Well, it started like this.
Thanks to some folks in marketing, we each took the Bert Decker course “Communicate to Influence” on presentation skills. (“Jean, you really have to learn to keep your hands at your sides; you’re all over the place!”) What a phenomenal 2 days of on-your-feet guidance about connecting with your audience!
Two books have been our guide on dramatically reducing the clutter on our slides.
Then thanks to my colleagues Chris Spagnuolo and Ben Carey, we Rally Agile Coaches began reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. We’ve also worked to reduce the number of slides. We’ve become more cognizant of the aesthetic of each slide. So, notice in the slide here about defects, we no longer have a bulleted-list of all the issues around defects and what might cause them to be increased. The slide is no longer the story; it is the backdrop to the story that the trainer/presenter tells.
Here is an example of our leaner, sleeker slide look
Ben and Chris also urged us to learn more about visual thinking via the sweet book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. Questions remain about how I am ever going to absorb the part of the book that has me drawing more for/during my presentations. Hey! I’m verbal! However the power of visual thinking has already impacted how I look and see and imagine as I think about training topics.
So, given all this work, we now talk about our courseware in terms of, “Has that Product Owner course been ‘Deckerated’ yet?” or, “Oh, I just ‘Deckerated’ our Certified ScrumMaster class! It’s SWEET!” By combining learning from all these sources, we’ve learned the power of creating an end-to-end, visually rich, and compelling story. We’re jazzed. We are looking forward to spreading the joy both for our participants as well as for we trainers.
So, I’ll ask the question again, “Have you Deckerated today?”
RallyDev.com
