Rally is proud of its continued growth since our inception 8 years ago. In the last 2 years, we’ve practically doubled in size. And now we need help sustaining our pride in our company, our culture, and our people. We need a great, unique Director of HR.
Rally Looks Different
Taking its lead from Jim Collins “Good to Great”, Rally truly lives by its core values. For us, our Director of HR would be both an internal and external model and supporter of these values: Create your own reality; Respect people; Make and meet commitments; Give back to the community; Theory-driven decision making; Sustainable work-life balance.
We’re proud of our awards!
Named the Best Company to Work For in Colorado in 2009 and 2010, and ranked the #6 Best Places to Work in the nation from Outside Magazine in 2010, Rally offers a highly collaborative culture and work-life balance that attracts top talent. Our product gets plenty of accolades too, winning four consecutive Jolt Awards (the software industry’s equivalent of the Oscars®) in our category 2006-2009 and recently recognized by industry analyst Forester Research as “offering the best combination of capability and strategy of Agile ALM tools.”
Agile organizations look different
From the start, Rally has prided itself in being a truly Agile organization in the software industry. What does it mean to be a Director of HR in an Agile company? Here are a few characteristics of Agile we value:
Servant Leadership — our management model takes a page out of the Robert Greenleaf approach to leadership: lead by serving and serve by leading. Our Director of HR must be someone who can sustain this environment, mentor others in it, and create professional development opportunities for growth in this management style.
Self-Organizing Teams — part of being an organization of servant leaders includes a strong belief in the value of self-organizing teams. We eschew command-and-control style management. Rather, we seek insights from teams and turn to them to guide our solutions that align with our corporate vision.
Emphasis on Teams — Rally embraces a strong culture of collaboration. For us, that means that we value team accomplishments over individualism or heroism. Our HR Director needs to help us guide employees in the value of team ownership and the intrinsic rewards therein.
De-emphasis on hierarchy — Finally, in our Agile company, we de-emphasize traditional hierarchical organizational structures. Rally is proud of maintaining a fairly flat organization even as we grow upwards of 250 people.
Could This Be You?
So, our Director of HR may look a bit different than you might expect. Still, we are looking for some great solid HR credentials that should look very familiar to you. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you via the career section of our web site. There you will find a detailed job description and other benefit details. If this is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with your friends and with your networks using the “ShareThis” button below or through our LinkedIn post.
And why is this so important to a successful Agile organization?
Watch this 3-minute video for some of my ideas and 4 of the 10 characteristics of a Servant Leader from Robert Greenleaf. Or, see my full hour-long Servant Leadership webinar for a more in-depth look at this #9 characteristic of an Agile organization.
About the Author: Jean Tabakais a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by emailor RSS.
While the answer MAY be “Yes!”, I posited that there may be a way to save our PMOs from going the way of the now extinct dodo bird.
8 Ways To Re-Tool a PMO in an Agile Environment
Have the PMO involved in helping rollout Agile on several pilot projects
This experience forms the roots for how the Agile PMO will engage throughout the organization with other project teams.
Besides ensuring that Agile training occurs, the Agile PMO can become the coaches of coaches, training the ScrumMasters of each team. They can also be the Agile voice into the business to ensure the Product representatives are fully bought into their role in Agile.
Learn from Lean: start a Kaizen and Gemba mentality now
The PMO should be the shepherds of continuous improvement so that the Agile adoption is not only sustained; it is vibrantly organic, every improving. This means moving beyond team-level iteration-focused retrospectives.
Kaizen events create cross-team learning. This learning exposes team practices that can be useful at an organizational level. In such cases, the team practices are elevated to the organizational “Standard of Work” (see later item). Moreover, the Kaizen event clarifies when a practice does not serve the entire organization and can remain a team practice, supported by team agreements and adhered to by the team.
In addition, in between Kaizen events, apply “Gemba”. An Agile PMO learns about the organization and spreads knowledge through the organization by being involved in projects. That means going to see, or “Gemba” according to Lean practices.
Being engaged with teams rather than dictating from afar may be a dramatic shift in PMO behavior. And, it is pivotal to teams’ respecting the role of the PMO in creating a successful Agile adoption.
Change your definition of “Standard of Work”
This is not a set of standards defined by and enforced by the PMO for project conformance.
In Agile, as guided by Lean practices, a standard of work is a statement of what is currently useful, how things are currently done. It provides a team a backdrop from which to perform continuous improvement through Kaizen events such as retrospectives.
The Agile PMO, rather than controlling and patrolling, engages in facilitating teams in continuous learning. This PMO encourages empowered teams and amplifies the learning that arises when such teams are truly empowered.
A great way to provide this facilitation and to engender cross-team involvement is to help organize and facilitate program-level and multi-program release planning meetings and product councils. The Agile PMO formulates a rhythm and a continuously improving agenda to help these meetings deliver the greatest benefit across teams.
Along with being facilitative, Agile PMOs act as Servant Leaders. They serve their organizations by finding out what they need and getting it for them.
They lead by serving. They remove impediments. They measure what is a problem for teams so that they can serve teams be removing the problem. They don’t look for status from teams; they look for how they can serve teams.
So, for an Agile PMO, leading the Agile rollout means finding out what teams need and delivering that. It is about creating collaborative plans, not collecting statuses. For more about Servant Leaders in Agile, check out the first section of my book Collaboration Explained.
Provide guidance on regulatory adherence
In organizations that must adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley, FDA, HIPAA, or other regulatory guidelines, the Agile PMO can represent these “red” (immutable) stories in each team’s Product Backlog.
The PMO governance work can be the guide to each Product Owner on how to deliver the documents or features that help the entire organization remain in compliance with these regulatory constraints. Governance is now a service to project teams versus being a control mechanism.
Seek guidance from Lean to use Flow, Pull, and Innovate as guidelines for organizational-level Agile adoption
Much of the guidance here has a hint of Lean about it. That is because PMOs work at an organizational level. Moving Agile beyond one or more pilot teams requires guidance for maturing and scaling.
I recommend applying a 5-step approach which is based on Full, Pull and Innovate principles from Lean Thinking.
Once Development group is working with the business to deliver prioritized, valued items, the Agile PMO can bring in other ‘back office” functions to help ensure a growing Agile adoption.
Finance, HR, infrastructure, the executive team, and others must eventually all accept the Agile approach for true organizational change and value.
The Agile PMO has an opportunity to be the mentors and guides for this growth and maturation.
Foster useful metrics
Let go of that Waterfall security blanket around what are useful project or program metrics.
Determine which metrics to track that directly help organizations concentrate on value delivery.
Whatever does not deliver value is waste. It may be temporarily necessary waste. Or it may be a pernicious, embedded waste that has been assumed to be necessary.
An Agile PMO ferrets out these “false friend” metrics and works with teams to determine metrics around value: test coverage, team velocity, agile adoption assessment, defect counts, definition of done.
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#9 in our list of the 
