With the publishing of Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup, I can barely go a day without talking to someone about it. Eric clearly executed a lean startup on himself and this topic – by focusing on learning. Eric started much of his work a couple of years ago with his blog Startup Lessons Learned and by publicly speaking on the topic. I saw him first at Return Path, a local Rally customer, in May of 2010. Since that time, he has continued to refine the principles and collected great stories for this book that speaks equally well to an new entrepreneur as a seasoned business professional.
The book is just a fantastic and hard-hitting summary of this approach to business, as well as a manual on how to teach entrepreneurial behaviors. If Eric was a seasoned author, this would be a great book, but given the fact it is his first effort – it makes the book astonishing. It debuted at #2 on New York Times Bestseller list!
If you do not know Eric or The Lean Startup model, it works by developing product/service in parallel with the customer in a market. The method can be summarized by three words executed repeatedly; Build, Measure, Learn. These cycles continue to help you assess whether to stay the course, pivot or stop. The Lean Startup is a combination of applying Agile Development, and Customer Development methods, but draws on Lean, crowd sourcing/social and complexity to create a true collection of thinking and acting tools for today’s complex world.
Eric’s sub title really sums the book up well –
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
… as these ideas and thinking apply equally as well for venture-backed tech startup, impact investing, social startups or internally funded intrapreneuring efforts. If you read his blog, you will see he A/B tested about 20 sub-titles to come to this one. So, not only is a great sub-title, but it is one that attracts the right market.
Have you clicked on the book image to buy it yet? No? Let me try one more thing!
For Agile teams, programs or enterprises, the message from this book should be clear: you need to start applying customer development approaches to the front-end of your Agile efforts. You can read about Rally’s latest customer development in the Making of Project Stratus; and you can see the results of these efforts at our Agile Portfolio Management launch in December.
As part of this launch effort, Zach Nies and I have been given a great gift in the last month of continuous lean startup (more on that in later posts). Last week, I found out that Zach and I will have the opportunity to interview Eric live on February 2nd. If you don’t buy the book, you should at least register for the 1 hour video event.
Last week, Zach and I enjoyed the incredible opportunity of engaging in a video interview with Geoffrey Moore on his new book, Escape Velocity. First things first, for those of you who didn’t attend live, the archived webinar and slides are now available.
The book really hit home for me because, at its core, its really all about steering the Agile business. It provides both the new portfolio models and the specific stories for executives, as well as Product and Development teams to escape the “pull” of the past successes and set yourself up for the next success. Specifically for development teams making the transition to a more Agile execution model, Geoffrey describes ways to work the budget/portfolio process to invest in the further development of the companies crown jewels. With this kind of strategic investment, you can work to create your unmatchable offer power that wins customer market while increasing company power necessary to become a top tier play in your category. Geoffrey really connected the topics from the book with his perspective on the value of Agile development:
“Agile puts you in the problem state with the end user, live in that problem state and drive backwards on how to get there. If there is an opportunity for a breakthrough, you will find it before anyone else does.” – Geoffrey Moore
Take the next step
I highly recommend buying the book, if you haven’t already. In addition to standard e-book, hardcover and audible versions of the book, Geoffrey has released a real innovations for his new and 20 year fans. With Escape Velocity, he created an enhanced ebook on Amazon with embedded videos and an enhanced ebook for the Ipad/Ibook with links back into past books and models. There is now one source for everything Moore!
Geoffrey’s book has specific strategies for transforming vision and strategy. These strategies should be easier for Agile teams that can support fast learning. If however you are looking to first transform execution power to enable your escape velocity, don’t miss some of our great content to support your Agile adoption:
If you currently use Agile at the team or multi-team level or are brand-new to these concepts, share one of our online Agile toolkits with your team:
If you want more education in this webinar format, sign up for our ongoing Agile Webinar Series. Our next topic is Agile in High Assurance Environments, led by author and methodologist Dean Leffingwell and our own Craig Langenfeld.
If you want to make the case for Agile development in your organization and learn why it’s becoming the norm, get the Forrester report on Agile development trends and tools.
Please let us know what you thought of the webinar by commenting on this post.
I highly recommend the book, buy it today, and see the video. As you can see from my collections of his books, I love his work. His command of English and simple models always makes reading his books a real pleasure. I got “Crossing the Chasm,” when I was in school as an engineer back in the 1980′s. I enjoyed working with him and The Chasm Group back in 2000 while I was at BEA. But, now this newest book has hit while Rally is working with customers that struggle with escaping the “pull” of the past. As Geoffrey describes, this is “A better vocabulary to talk about power versus performance.” I see many customers describing why they invest in Rally – to transform their execution and offer power.
As a result, this book is not just interesting for product management, but for the executives in engineering, marketing and sales, as well as the whole executive team. Because my team was so excited about this book, we were able to get our marketing team excited too. I am thrilled to announce that Zach and I will be interview Geoffrey live on September 22nd. Please consider joining us for this webinar.
Now to helping us make this interview work for you. Zach and I are going to run this interview based on our understanding of this book and our experiences, but we are also very interested in your questions. We will support chat and Twitter during the webinar, but your comments on this post would be even more appreciated. Here are some of the our draft questions:
Most Agile development teams have fixed the execution power level – what is next and why?
I have read all your books – can you reflect on this book in relationship to past works? Is the really the capstone?
For a recent graduated from college, what order would you have him read your books?
Do you assume engineering needs to be Agile to pull off this approach?
You mention it’s important to separate differentiation, neutralization and optimization efforts, why?
I’m excited! Next week is shaping up to be something of an epic little timebox for me: 3 keynotes in 3 different cities in 3 days. I love it! Sustainable pace? Well, maybe not every week. But next week has me fired up. I’ve got a definition of Done Done Done that has me flying high.
Here is what’s on the agenda for my 3-day extravaganza:
April 5th finds me in Chicago, an old haunt of mine.
I’ll be part of one of my favorite events with Rally and its partners: “Agile Comes to You”. The keynote? “12 Agile Adoption Failure Modes.” I’ll be talking about negative patterns for Agile adoptions. Yes, I know there are more than 12 ways to ensure an Agile adoption fails. But I only have 30 minutes to speak :-) Heading back to Chicago, I look forward to making new friends and meeting up with old friends, especially one of our panelists, Brendan Flynn of PointRoll. I’m eager to find out what Chi-town is up to with the move of Agile onto “main street” (or is that the Magnificent Mile?) Want to join us? Sign-up here, come say hello at the Chicago Marriott Downtown, and share some of your experiences and queries.
April 6th I hop over the border to one of my favorite Canadian cities, Toronto, Ontario.
Here again, I’ll have the honor of bringing my keynote perspectives on how Agile adoptions fail. I’m eager to learn with attendees what they have seen in this great city and the surrounding technology area about their Agile adoptions. And, I look forward to our discussions on how we can truly succeed in adopting Agile for great, sustainable business value. If you are in Toronto on the 6th, join us in this “Agile Comes to You” event at the Toronto Grand Hotel and Suites by signing up here.
April 7th I return home to Denver, the “Mile High City.”
And yes there is another event in store. I’m very honored to have been invited to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural “Mile High Agile” event. This is going to be a particularly special event for me. My colleagues Rachel Weston and Zach Nies will be co-presenting on “Using Agile Principles to Solve Tough Problems in Your Business.” Rally as a Platinum Sponsor is investing in our great Agile community in the Denver area. The air may be thin up here but the interest in Agile is deep and passionate. We are extremely fortunate to have a group of wonderful, hard-working organizers from the Agile Denver group: Brad Swanson, Somnath Ghosh, Walter den Haan, Tom Smallwood, Eric Cussen, Jim Turosak, Jan Beaver, and Jon Archer. Brad has worked with me to engage in one of my favorite topics for the keynote, “Elevating the Agile Community of Thinkers.” This talk affords me the opportunity to continue to share my passion about community as thinkers and thinkers as community in our Agile world. To all my friends along the Front Range here in Colorado, I look forward to seeing you at The Plaza at the Denver Merchandise Mart.
Coming full circle, my “3 strange days” will move through Agile failure modes to the great community of thinkers we gather in our Agile growth and success. As Captain Picard would say, “Warp One! Engage!
Jean Tabaka is a crash skier, college hoops shredologist, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka
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.
On our recent webinar “Demystifying Cloud, The Next Generation Architecture” we had a number of thoughtful and tough questions related to security, intellectual property and risks. We provided answers to these questions in the recording, but I found the recent SD Times article “Cloud Providers Answer Tough Questions” an even better source. In this article, a number of experts on specific platforms from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce as well as Rally’s own Zach Nies answer questions about security, lock-in and IP.
Henry Ford didn't foresee the impact of the first car - do we foresee the true impact of the Cloud?
Daryl Plummer from Gartner also did a great job recently describing the real point of cloud computing as he reviews Russ Daniels recent Forbes article. Russ says:
“In my view, the ability to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship in this new model is one of the most promising ways to ignite the next wave of economic growth. We can no more see the full impact of the cloud than Henry Ford foresaw the impact of his desire to produce more cars in less time.”
As a result of SD Times’ tough questions and our desire to “ignite the next wave of economic growth,” we decided to talk in our next webinar with Global Logic and IBM about how to go to the cloud and mitigate risk along the way. As with any pilot, the goal is to enter wisely, learn fast and then move forward. Given the iterative and incremental method of Agile is best suited for this fast-learning approach, we will title our next talk “Going to the Cloud – the Agile Way.”
We are structuring the content now, but I would love to hear your ideas, questions or feedback on this topic. I will also post a registration link for the webinar as soon as I have it.
Thesis: Taking a learning-first approach to your cloud efforts can help you avoid the risks of vendor lock-in, IP security and a spectacular failure
Proposed Agenda:
Review the innovation, benefits and risks
Typical approach – Choosing early, over selling, dramatic big bang
The Agile/Lean approach – Set-based, scientific and learning-based
The Denver Agile Success Tour continued with four open space sessions. For about 20% of the room, this was the first open space session they have ever participated in. Groups broke into discussions on leadership, testing, scaling and tooling and then did a read-out to share their conclusions with the larger audience. (For my other live posts from the Denver event, see 5 Stories of Agile Success and What’s On Your Mind?)
#1 Open Space – Executives and Agile Adoption, led by Israel Gat
This group included new as well mature Agile folks and teams of 9 to 280 people – Given that spread, there was an overwhelming agreement that “our executives do not understand it” and “I, the executive, wants the whole iron triangle fixed – time, budget and scope.” For executives who do not understand agile, it is very hard for people to communicate “What is in it for the executive?”
Conclusion – Socializing Agile is as important as doing Agile well. Your adoption will regress if your executives are not sold. Without time spent with executives, there is a bitter slide back down coming for the team. A slide like this is really hard to recover from.
Recommendation – At the point of scaling your agile adoption, contract up-front with your executive on the results, but only pick only one dimension. (Productivity, Time-to-Market or Quality)
#2 Open Space – Testing, Quality and Leadership, led by Zach Nies and Peggy Reed from Avaya
Topic time spent on willingness of test teams to move to Agile and what does pulling testing forward mean? Can I be Agile if I do not test inside the iteration? At Avaya, they do a lot of testing outside the iteration due a large matrix of configurations.
Conclusion – Make sure testing team is at iteration planning and release planning. Always honor your time box and retrospect on your testing coverage.
Recommendation – Focus on making story sizes smaller to bring testing into the iteration.
#3 Open Space – Scaling and Large Scale Adoption, led by Evan Campbell
Topics focused on collecting metrics while the guerrilla insurgency is working and before they get “busted” doing Agile. The result of not collecting metrics means getting stuck in an “Agile Ghetto.” Top-down adoption approaches are becoming more common, but came back to Rally’s Enterprise Adoption model called Flow-Pull-Innovate that is based on Lean.
Conclusion – It is inevitable that you are going to have to evangelize the Agile adoption. Start building the case from day 1.
Recommendation - Focus on the change management process for large scale adoption. Practices are a key focus for small teams, but not the key focus of large scale adoption.
#4 Open Space – Tooling Agile, led by Karen Kagiyama and Amy Wiley
Tools enable best practices, and integrations are inevitable because one tool cannot support all types and nuances of development teams and technology needs. Continuous integration, build management and test coverage metrics and reports correlate into the context of iteration, release, and program of teams are critical for know “where are we right now?”
Conclusion – The ultimate goal is a single dashboard to support the insights and planning.
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