Agile Development Blog

The various sizes of and shapes of Ecospheres

As you may know, I am very passionate about the concepts of sustainability.  For my birthday this year, my thoughtful wife and son gave me a living example of sustainability that sits on my desk and reminds me to work on this topic everyday.  It is called an EcoSphere and I got it from EcoProducts Home Store here in Boulder (they are folks who also provide all of our compostables that help us approach zero waste here at Rally – they are a great Boulder success story).

The Ecosphere is a completely closed world and is self-sustainable. It was developed by two NASA scientists (the late Dr. Joe Hanson and the late Dr. Clair Folsome) trying to create models for long-term space flight.  In it you will find algae, shrimp and bacteria living in a closed cycle with sun light as energy. (Learn more about EcoSphere’s sustainable model on their site.)

At $125 for a small sphere they are a bit pricey, but they are fun to watch, people always notice the shrimp moving around on my desk.  After attending Thomas Friedman’s talk on “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” I realize they are just another part of my “work in progress” to living sustainably in the U.S.  These do not feed me like my chickens and goats, but they also do not eat like my dogs and cats.

Here is mine on my desk - cool eh?

Definitely the most common question is:  “Are those sea monkeys?“  According to the web site, they live 2 to 7 years with really no maintenance and NO they are not sea monkey branded brine shrimp.

This EcoSphere keeps me focused on the long road of continuous improvement needed to make our industry a zero carbon footprint or sustainable industry.  We are currently on the road to be a larger emitter of CO2 than the airline industry by 2020.

We have to find the innovations in infrastructure, the methods and tools to reverse this.  My of view of how to reverse this behavior is through the emerging software value cycle that is made possible by SaaS/Clouds, Agile development and Web 2.0 customer communities.  You can read my thoughts on these topics or hear a MassTech webinar.

I have about 15 of these guys in my Eco-sphere.

I believe that with the change to Lean thinking – from products to services and with virtual connections to customers – we can learn to quickly adapt and adopt to new sustainable products and behaviors.

We need a value chain in the IT industry that is closed loop and sustainable, not open loop like the Story of Stuff.

I encourage you to take a moment and consider getting one of these model worlds for yourself or your best friends.  It will keep you on the road to smarter, leaner and greener.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

Further Reading:

• Let’s stop splitting hairs – We need to get to zero carbon output to really make a difference
• Leadership in Sustainability – Blog Talk Radio Interview

I have linked to Israel’s work before and I have seen him talk about the social contract that he made at BMC in 2006.

However this new post and the attached slide share decks give the seldom-heard whole story. Israel has also provided a new introduction with a solid historical as well as current context; this makes the social contract concept even easier to apply in today’s turbulent times.

This post hits the heart and mind of leaders of Agile teams.  I have responsibility for our product development and operations teams at Rally.  This post caused me to find ways to double my efforts to lead our team from “within” as we are expanding with a new office/team as well as continuing down the flow-pull-innovate road of agile expertise.

Check out some of Israel’s other great work by visiting his blog, The Agile Executive

Side note: Many people love to give folks that live in Boulder, Colorado a ribbing about spiritual “woo-woo” focus (home of natural food including soy and herbal tea, Naropa Insitute and plenty of hippies).

I think many skeptics like to give that same line to folks who talk about the “people” side of effective Agile enterprise adoption.

Israel’s post is all about managing and leading the team – without this kind of leadership you will be destine to always remain an Agile amateur. Think big about your Agile adoption, but also think big about your personal journey to this level of team leadership.  Everyone wins on this journey and this posts keeps you on the rails, especially in these times.

In Boulder Colorado, it is a beautiful spring day to admire the great spaceship that we live on.  In November 2007, we started our efforts to “green” Rally and our industry.  Since that day we have made some great progress on what I imagine to be a long journey.  I wanted to thank the employees at Rally, the City of Boulder, EcoCycle, Xcel, Salesforce Earthforce, EFBay Area “Do One Thing” and Native Energy for helping us start are journey.

Like adopting Agile, the effort to go “green” needs to be taken iteratively and incrementally and is done more quickly with good advisers, see above and below.  Our goal of fueling the move of Rally and our entire IT Industry to a sustainable industry will take continuous improvement process for years to come.   Carbon Neutral as a company and ultimately as an industry clearly has to be the goal.  Based on the work we have done to benchmark our energy usage and logical/economic actions, it is obvious it is going to take years, innovations and incentives for us to even make reach the goals adopted by the City of Boulder – Kyoto. (10% less Carbon output of 1990 levels by 2012 or 20% reduction from 2006)

For that reason, we started in our incremental approach toward “green expert” slowly:

• November – December 2008 – Kick-off efforts
  • Committed to off-setting our carbon use from Hosted Operations with Wind credits – DONE with Native Energy Cool Watts.
  • Started our team and the brainstorming environment – DONE – Green Ideas Hive
  • Signed up with City of Boulder program to help us learn from others – DONE – BeClimate Smart Audit

• Q1 2008 – Organize the Team
  • Build a backlog of Green ideas and build a roadmap of efforts for Q2 – DONE Roadmap Q2
    • April Implement Composting – DONE with help of Western Disposal (composting services), EcoCycle (consulting services), EcoProducts (compostable products) and Corporate Express (recyclable and compostable office products).
    • May – Implement a commuting incentive plan
    • June – Implement a single stream recycling plan
  • Build a backlog of Green efforts for Q3 to be partially funded by savings done in Q2
    • potentials
      include power management software, new building build-out efforts,
      moving to an alternative energy data center, reducing the energy used
      by our servers.

Thank you for your help, let’s keep working together to be “green
experts.”  It is going to take all of us to counteract our effects.
(The US has 4% of world populations but contributes 22% to global
warming – stopglobalwarming.org.)

Please post any comments here.