Agile Development Blog

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.