Agile Development Blog

In a continuation on my last post on Eric Ries and The Lean Startup, I wanted to share how these concepts continue to ripple through Rally. (Learn more on how to apply these topics in your business at our upcoming in-person and virtual Portfolio Management Roadshow featuring Eric alongside an awesome line-up of speakers.)

Three weeks ago while in Denmark, I had a deep dive with customers on the topic. While in Copenhagen Denmark and talking with 40 European customers at Rally’s Agile Open Forum, one of the top 5 questions that group proposed was:

“How can we develop features that give the maximum long-term value and the minimum long-term cost?”

Vist Custdev.com for this "Cheat Sheet"

I believe you will find the answer to this question in Steve Blank’s customer development approach to differentiating new products or simply in the build-measure-learn cycle of Lean Startups. For Agile teams that can already build right and build fast, this answers the question of what to build!

By focusing on the concept of creating “validated learning,” a Lean Startup team does not provide solution development teams stories that are not validated or constructed to validate a hunch.  As such, the Agile backlog becomes prioritized by learning and risk.  The result is a team that couples Agile product development cycles with customer problem discovery and customer solution validation. What is great about this approach?  It works at the whole business or product-line level, and you can also slim this down for use with A/B testing of enhancements too. Your level of application only depends upon your scope as well as the scale and maturity of your Agile efforts.  The more Agile your enterprise is the more leverage you can have with these techniques.

The result of this work allows you to determine, if there is desirability for this solution before you commit to ship it.  As a result of understanding the intersection of feasibility, effectiveness and desirability, you can be sure to deliver features that have maximum value.  And, by working with a minimal viable product (MVP) concept, you can be sure not to overbuild that solution too.  In this way you can be sure to build the features with maximum value and minimal long-term cost.

To me, Lean Startup is a method to drive continuous innovation and brutal, entrepreneurial prioritization. But taken to the extreme, Lean Startup is a way of being and acting and can become an attribute of culture. In addition to speaking and teaching on the topic, we have had some customers and partners come to learn, teach and do with us. The following efforts demonstrate how these activities can become cultural.

Act like a scientist, not a fire fighter

In a tradition of Lean companies, we had one of our largest customers come visit our office in early October.  He and his company have adopted and scaled Agile very well.  Now, they are focused on creating validated learning to do concurrent set-based development on their toughest problems. He pointed us toward this HBR Article on Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.  You will notice the Lean rules and principles from Toyota support the Lean Startup approach.  This customer’s hope was to share his learning to help make us a better partner.  His trip was a true gift.  Thank you, Pat.

Two weeks prior to our customer visit, our friends George Kembel and Scott Dorsey, from Stanford’s d.school were here in Boulder. The principles and method of design thinking are clearly wrapped into the Lean Startup.  In design thinking, the iterations include practices to empathize, ideate, prototype, and test/reframe. Typically, these cycles are used to create the initial design of a new product or service, but not at the d.school. In the d.school, students take these concepts into more of a continuous cycle to help shape emerging services or social startups. Like Lean Startup, the d.school is learning to run people and teams through fast and continuous cycles of build-measure-test to create a “continuous innovation to create radically successful” efforts.

In a serendipitous way,  I taught a seminar on customer development and business model canvas approaches to fellows at the  Unreasonable Institute.  In September, Zach did a crash course on “Why Lean Startup Approaches Work” for 120 folks at the Silicon Flatiron’s portion CU Law School and Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup.  Like my first post said, it has truly been Lean Startup everywhere at Rally.

If this post was not concrete enough for you, my final Lean Startup post is on “How to Apply Lean Startup to Your Agile Rollout.”

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.

Last week was quite a week here at Rally. Given the many activities we experienced, I was reminded of our engineering “hackathons” except applied in a whole new way.

Why do we only talk about hackathons for developers and the engineering team? (If you aren’t familiar with hackathons, you might start by reading our series on how to foster a culture of innovation.)

Hackathon – a time-boxed event, typically a day or a week, used to build prototypes of innovations that could be helpful in enhancing user experience, architectural capacity, or development team effectiveness.

Given this definition and given the work we accomplished last week, it became clear to me that what we had done was run culture and space hackathons

Monday and Tuesday – knowledge team leadership and hacking your culture

On Monday and Tuesday, we took 30 folks at Rally through Christopher Avery’s “Knowledge Team Leadership” course. We’d invited Christopher in after great reports from two folks we sent to his class last year. Based on that feedback, we decided to try the course out as a “management training course” internally at Rally. There was a ton of added value in that course for new managers as well as executives.  Included in Chris’ class is his work on the responsibility process, seen in the picture below. (click on the image to get to Chris’s site.)

Chris Avery's Responsibility Model

The really cool thing about the course is that, while we were learning about teams and leadership, Christopher had us apply our course work in separate, meaningful small projects that run concurrently with the course.  With our 30 people, we subdivided into five small teams, where two teams decided to work on one project together. Because this was a private course, each group chose a project related to Rally’s culture.  I would argue that they all turned out to be culture hackathon projects given that we only had 6 clock hours to produce a cultural innovation “product”. And boy did we get some great stuff:

• Rallypedia – a new internal wiki at Rally that has an encyclopedia of terms, models, stories and lore at Rally.  This site is critical to keeping our culture strong in a rapidly growing, geographically distributed company. What a great cultural contribution.
• Beyond Rally - a new wiki site for after-hours and non-work related announcements at Rally.  This open site shares music and other social events, for sale items as well upcoming volunteering opportunities.
• Core Values Revisited – a new wiki site that shares stories about us living our core values.  It is a platform to revisit these values and separate core values from cultural norms.  This project is a critical part of us creating our shared vision for 2020 at Rally.
• Rally teams video – a 5-minute video that introduces new employees to the importance of teams at Rally. The video explains five key components of teamwork and how this will inform and guide any new employee into our collaborative culture

Two of the projects launched at the “project demos” event during the course. The other two will launch later this month.  It was a testament to how well some of Christopher’s approach works for quickly, building high-performance teams.  It was also a testament to effectiveness of holding non-software hackathons.  Those two days of project work left all of us on a real high as hackathons tend to do. For me, we had taken advantage of that hackathon sense of innovation and urgency and applied it to great ideas about extending our culture.

Wednesday and Thursday – Design Thinking and hacking on your space

After two days of training with Christopher and our culture hackathon, I got to spend most of Wednesday and Thursday with a group that was focused on shaping our new office space.  (Yes, we are moving again!)  We have learned about building effective team rooms as we have moved our team to six locations since starting in 2003.  I see these six moves as a real gift.  It has forced us to keep playing around with furniture and space to help enable the emergence of high-performance and collaborative teams.  With each move, we are invited to purposefully pay attention to our culture and our knowledge flow. So our goal with this latest move is to be even more impactful and extend these innovations in space design to our entire office space.

To enable this kind of innovation to emerge, we had a space design charrette that was facilitated by George Kembel, Executive Director at the d.school at Stanford University.  This was a natural out growth of the innovations that I got to work with at while at the d.social summit this summer.  It could not have happened without John Kembel (yes George’s twin brother) and his team at RightNow here in Boulder.   Due to the successful RightNow acquisition of HiveLive, the RightNow office is growing and forcing a move here in Boulder as well.    It was really cool to experience this space type of hackathon with two companies of two different sizes in two different contexts with two different cultures at once.

Roughly five people from each company gathered in a large open space in the Rally offices to run their hackathon. After establishing clear tasks for each team, surfacing motivations, making some agreements, crafting a higher elevating goal for each team, and celebrating the diversity, we jumped in to an iterative process.  That process had the two teams move through four different process steps:

• point of view & strategy
• approach and empathy
• low resolution prototypes
• iterate on build-out plans

As a result of that work, the RightNow team created three floor designs using floor tape, tables and foam core. It was cool to watch that team focus on the prototype stage.  Because Rally is dealing with 65,000 feet and a move-in date of February, we were more focused on planning next steps and learning from a rapid prototyping experiment that we plan to start in our current office next week.   To aid us in our prototyping efforts, we have already built three different T-Walls based on formations I had seen at the d.school. We’ve let the T-walls loose in an area close to Support and Product Development to get feedback.  We also plan to tear out a couple of large tables in two of our conference rooms to make room for more flexible uses in those team huddle rooms.

Huddle Room at d.school

From our space hackathon, we hope to learn from those prototypes in the next month and let them inform what furniture components we will order for the space.  These low-resolution, non-precious prototypes will hopefully allow teams to experiment with more flexible solutions for their work spaces, team rooms, huddle rooms and conference/training rooms.

With regard to our point of view, strategy and approach, our prototyping team is resolved to run way through the finish line and set a cadence for continually hacking our space.  We are likely to be in our new space for a long time.  As a result, we need to keep the spirit of innovation alive and drive down the set-up time and costs for changing our space to suit the emergent nature of teams around Rally.

What a great week for implementing culture and space hackathons. I hope you and your organization are doing the same.

What has worked in hacking your space or your culture?

For more ideas from the d.school do not miss their site and blog and the tour of the new space.

Ryan Martens is a tomatillo salso maker, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

I am passionate about design; if it were not for the boom-bust cycles in architecture, I would have followed that education/career path.  As a result of that passion, I got really excited when I saw HiveLive four years ago.  So excited in fact, that Rally jumped in as key first customer and based Agile Commons on HiveLive’s platform.  I even personally invested in the effort led by three Kembel brothers: John, Jeremy and Geoff.  Last year, HiveLive’s  journey took another turn as they sold to RightNow. After meeting RightNow’s David Vap and speaking with a good part of their technical team,  I would say John, the VP of Social Solutions, is right that they made a great move.

John’s design-thinking approach was front and center to HiveLive.  It came from his background at Standford’s design school and a stint at IDEO.  As I got to know John, he mentioned all the great things going on with his other brother and twin George.  George was busy creating a new version of the design school, called the Stanford d.school.   The new d.school has broadened beyond just a partnership of art and mechanical engineering to become a interdisciplinary school that brings design thinking to all majors.   As I learned more about this, I started pulling on John’s shirt to get me out there so I could go see the place and meet George.  Well last week, I participated in the first ever d.social summit for two days with 15 folks focused on the intersection of design thinking and social thinking.  Twins John and George Kembel actually facilitate in stereo.  To watch and be a part of their combined effort was like drinking from a fire hose.

The event and the people were great fun to work with and pushed my limits on the overlap of design thinking and social thinking.  Working there really made me feel strong and I found myself in a flow most of the time.  It caused me to notice that I really love the expansion of design to design thinking. But for you and your agile teams, the innovations in team room furniture was really important. Creating a culture of innovation relies on creating the right environment.  If you have read Takeuechi and Nonaka’s book on Knowledge Management, you will recognize the concept of “Ba.” Ba is the shared space that creates context for the knowledge-creating company.  (See figure 4.3 on page 102 of their book for a cool illustration of the whole concept)

The d.school is full of flexible, collaborative space of all kinds, shapes and sizes.  They are constantly trying new things there.  Built for running multiple, parallel design projects in 15 week cycles, it is empathetic to extreme users.  The space is in its sixth iteration of the space.  Scott Doorley and Dave Baggeroer worked with George over the last five years to really make this place something special.   As a result of working at the extreme of rapid collaboration, they have come up with some fantastic furniture designs that you should consider copying for your team and meeting rooms.  Unfortunately, you can’t buy this stuff – you have to build it locally.

Here is a set of stackable and highly portable white boards.

Notice the Z-shaped foot that allows them to stack and move around corners.  These ideas came from retail stores.  Also notice the red peg in the whiteboard.  This is designed to hang portable whiteboards that you can take back to your own space.   It could also hold a pad of flip-chart paper.

This line is where they store the student efforts.  Notice how the hanging whiteboards are stored.  It is easy to imagine collaborating in another person’s office and then bringing the whiteboard back to your office without using tons of flip chart pads.

Below is a portable wall system built with spring-loaded feet to allow you to make semi-transparent or opaque walls by lightly snapping them into place.  You can see them used above to make the line where student’s store their work.

These cool pommel horses, pictured below, make great furniture for a team collaboration space.  You can sit, stand or work at the structures and they force you to not think in hierarchies:)

Finally, don’t miss the d.school’s blog and the coverage of their sugar cubes.

I hope some of these pieces of furniture compel you to try some new furniture in your space.  If you are not quite sold, you might read Tim Brown’s new book “Change by Design.” It is a great living example of the approaches that IDEO and the d.school use to create empathy, insight and desirable design in physical, virtual and social systems.

Do you have any experience applying design thinking in your agile teams?  Jared Spool’s talk at Agile 2009 was a great example of applying design thinking to software.

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