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Is Agile the key to building high assurance software?

Monday, December 6th, 2010

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Original Post by Ryan Martens

Of course!

Back in October, Rally started a project led by Craig Lagenfeld, one or our great Technical Account Managers, and Dean Leffingwell, see more on Dean below, to take the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) out of this application of agile methods.

Craig&Dean

If we hit this out of the park, we will be delivering guidance to the Agile Community that describes the best practice for developing high assurance software in highly regulated environments. The primary guidance will be a detailed “how to” whitepaper that will include examples of organizations who are already utilizing one or more of the practices and tools that we describe. Other deliverables will include a blog series, webinar, and tool validation guide. In short, the Agile Community will change their question from “can we utilize Agile to create high assurance software and still be compliant” to “how soon can we get the process and tools implemented to take advantage of Agile”.

Now two months into the project, we are trying to broaden the audience and collaborators for this work. We’re excited about this project and the great feedback we are getting from the Agile community. The blog series is generating a lot of interest, with people either wanting to know more or offering to contribute. Heck we even have quite a few emails from the Compliance Community wanting to help us out. Keep the emails coming- or better yet, start directing all of your support, questions, and feedback to the blog posts (and comments on this post) so that we can keep this building in a public forum. In the end Dean and I plan to deliver much more than a series of blog posts. We want to deliver guidance that Rally customers and Agile Practitioners can use to educate themselves and their organization.

The purpose of the project is to bring together Agilists who know that Agile is a better way to produce safe, reliable innovations but are unsure of how to accomplish this within a highly regulated environment. In our second post, Dean and I decided to use medical devices as the focus of our work, providing real examples of how medical device companies are confidentially using Agile practices today (see our recent posts on Abbott Labsand GE Healthcare). My part in the project focuses largely on ensuring that we provide a best of breed tooling suggestion to support the process that Dean and other experts in the field are developing. – Craig Langenfeld

Dean Leffingwell is a great friend, author, and entrepreneur. Before starting Requisite, the orignal makers of Req Pro, Dean ran a company called Rella that manufactured medical devices. Not only does he know software, agility and lean, but has many stripes from medical device certification and compliance. We are thrilled to be collaborating with him again; if you do not know his work, he is the author of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises and the soon to be published Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise.

Again, if you are in this field please join Criag, Dean and your peers in the High Assurance and Regulated category of Dean’s blog.

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, a school board member at Friends’ School Boulder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Craig Lagenfeld is a Technical Account Manager at Rally Software Development.

Dean Leffingwell is an entrepreneur, executive, author and consulting methodologist.

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Posted in Agile Best Practices, Agile Challenges, Agile Development, Dean Leffingwell, FDA, High Assurance, Open Source, Regulated, craig langenfeld | No Comments »

Congratulations RMMFI and Thanks for a great year of partnership!

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Congratulations to the Rocky Mountain Microfinance Institute on their recent 2 year birthday and on a very successful quarter including a $92,000 Technical Assistance Grant from the Community Development Financial Institution Fund (CDFI). That grant and others will assist in building their capacity and efforts toward being certified as a CDFI. The CDFI focuses on enabling ”financial institutions to provide credit, capital, and financial services to underserved populations and communities in the United States.”

Rally is proud to be a 2010 partner with RMMFI as part of our ‘1%Fund’ program which encourages employees to spend 1% of their paid time volunteering. In 2009 this program led to the contribution of over 2,300 volunteer hours. As part of an effort to increase our skill-based volunteering during 2010, Rally recently collaborated with RMMFI on a non-profit Salesforce.com Foundation implementation of Salesforce.com.

Rally’s Matt Harutun from customer support led this initiative after learning about the RMMFI team’s desire to integrate Salesforce.com into their business. Matt’s reflections on this partnership underscore the value of shared vision and continuous collaboration in creating a successful outcome.

I started the project, having enough knowledge of the Salesforce.com to be dangerous. I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to partner with RMMFI and help them deploy Salesforce.com successfully in their organization. There were many keys to making this venture successful, one of the key drivers, though, was having a shared vision of the world made that made for an easy introductory conversation.

A quick glance at RMMFI’s site tells you three things: the team is focused on learning, lending and coaching. Right away, we saw two areas of shared vision: learning and coaching. Part of what I love and enjoy about Rally is our commitment to being thought leaders in our space as well as challenging ourselves with new and innovative ideas. This translated well to RMMFI’s goal of teaching their clients about transforming dreams into a business plan. Similarly, both groups valued learning which provided both parties the ability to teach one another and also share and adapt ideas. During our project kickoff, we were fortunate to have the talented Rachel Weston, Rally’s Director of Services, facilitate this meeting. The RMMFI team was so enamored with the way she facilitated the kickoff that they took more notes on the Scrum process than the actual project! The RMMFI team takes a systems based approach to helping their clients improve their businesses – akin to what our Professional Services team does when they are engaged – drive client success through business transformation.

Another interesting outcome was RMMFI’s willingness to adopt Agile principles into their business. Not only were flip charts and Post-It notes a fun way to collaborate, but using key Agile principles like constantly prioritizing the team’s backlog and teaching their clients to focus on the highest priority items in their businesses helped increase visibility into the work being done and also opened new avenues for knowledge transfer. As a shameless plug, the project was run in an Agile fashion which was a very effective way to get RMMFI’s data model up and running quickly.

Finally, the team was also fortunate to have Rally’s own Salesforce.com Administrator, Rich McGuire, volunteer some of his time to guide the team through the Salesforce.com cloud. His expertise at the keyboard and affable personality quickly made him a team favorite. All this combined with his leadership in the local Salesforce.com User Group, we were able to continue the development effort by leveraging the development community at large who were also excited about the opportunity to pitch in.

At the outset of any projects, there are countless roadblocks, impediments and challenges that can derail any effort. Having good team chemistry through similar beliefs, actions and values – while not a surefire recipe for success – certainly helps pave the road to success.

Find a partner:

Finally, you should know this project involved partnership with other firms to get this done. Aptly nicknamed Michael “S’ Force, from Salesforce.com in Denver, has been a critical resource to help RMMFI all the way to the finish line. In addition, the folks from Application Experts, other Salesforce.com partners and members of the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado are moving in to help RMMFI operate, scale and maintain the Salesforce solution beyond launch. You know, it really does take a community to make these things work. Thank you everyone for your help.

The partnership with RMMFI is a great example of Rally’s move toward skill-based volunteering as part of our larger social mission that includes the forming Rally Foundation and our recent certification as a B Corporation. As an Entrepreneur Foundation company in Colorado, we use many of the resources available from the Entrepreneur’s Foundation to help us build a great corporate social responsibility program. In addition, the folks at Intersector Partners, were invaluable in helping us set-up a great working relationship with this young and amazingly effective non-profit.

Have you thought about your own social mission and the steps you’re taking to move that mission forward? One great way to build momentum is to seek out partnerships that provide opportunities and rewards for all involved. We are reaping those rewards in skills development, recruiting great folks and building intrinsic motivations through working towards a purpose. 2010 has been a stepping stone year and we are now primed for another big step in 2011.

Is corporate social responsibility something you care about? How are you making this a strategic part of your business?

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, Executive Director for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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Posted in Agile Culture, Agile Development, B Corporation, Matt Harutun, Open Source, Rachel Weston, Rich McGuire, Salesforce.com Foundation, Salesforce.com User Group, corporate social responsibility, innovation | No Comments »

Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level- Now Open

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

I am excited to say that this week we announced, at the Gartner AADI Summit and Agile Development Practices East, the availability of a new service offering and product from Rally. To support this launch and amplify the feedback loops from the community, we are starting a blog series on this topic. All of the blog posts in this series will show up in the blog, but also get linked into a summary page focused on Scaling Agile to the Strategic level (above release level, including roadmap and vision level for products, programs and solutions).

scaling

If managing Agile at the strategic level is something you are expert at or struggling with, you will want to follow this series. It is going to be written by a team of folks from Rally including myself, Jean, two internal Coaches at Rally, eighteen external Coaches at Rally and product experts.

In the last year, we have read a ton on strategic execution and lean, blogged on many of those ideas, experimented with talks and exercises and worked with a number of our customers. In addition, we ran our fellow Rallyers through many of these concepts. As a result of this work and the rapid development of our supporting product, code-named “Project Stratus,” we feel that we are ready to offer some value in the form of professional, product and community services to educate, enable and explore these concepts, methods and tools with our customers.

From sharing our experiences, we have learned that managing above the release level, at the roadmap and vision level, is different than project or program-level management. It is NOT:

as focused on the big epic feature as the desired outcome
an extension of the integrated agile release train as much as management of flow and contention

These offerings are brand new; we know they will change with more feedback and experience; as a result, they are being released now with less packaging and polish. The service offering starts with a two-day assessment and training effort, but then moves into a custom statement of work. The Project Stratus product offering will remain in preview status for the short term. We assume that focused work with 15 to 20 key customers will shape these solutions for all.

If you think you could be one of those customers, please do not hesitate to contact your account managers, coaches or customer success representatives. We are anxious to share these breakthrough concepts with customers who are willing to co-develop them with us.

With regard to the blog series, we see the following topics getting explored over the next three months:

kanban

Introduction
Our Theories and Why Project Stratus?
Our Agile Strategic Planning Service offering
The making of Project Stratus
Prediction in Kanban versus Scrum commitment
Enterprise Kanban and AgileZen
Others, based on your comments and feedback

If you have topic ideas or comments, please post below. Again, don’t forget to subscribe or share the RSS feed or email feed for the blog to be part of this discussion. We want YOU to participate in this Community of Thinkers!

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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Posted in ADP East, Agile Adoption, Agile Best Practices, Agile Culture, Agile Development, Gartner AADI Summit, Kanban, Lean, Open Source, Scaling Agile Adoption, innovation | No Comments »

Highlighting Hackathons

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Rally’s ongoing use of hackathons to spur innovation and creativity are highlighted in a new article on Inc., “How to Set Up a Hackathon.” Our own Todd Sheridan, Scrum Master, and Chris Browne, Agile Coach, contributed terrific insights into the benefits, rules and how to best setup successful hackathons. One of the key takeaways from the article is recognizing that hackathon thinking “shouldn’t only extend to product ideas, but to how the company operates internally.” Taking time to step away from everyday issues provides valuable distance that can help stimulate creative thinking.

Hackathons, a time-boxed event used to build prototypes of innovations, are a popular way to spur new ideas and have been employed by companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago we shared Rally’s experience hosting week long culture and space “hackathons” as part of our effort to extend these innovative events beyond their traditional engineering and development contexts. We had an awesome hackathon week, applying the fundamental ideas of urgency and innovation to our own company culture while producing four great projects.

Do you use hackathons in your organization? We’d love to hear about how you’re hacking your products, spaces and culture.

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

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Posted in Agile Culture, Agile Development, Agile Training, Collaboration, Culture of Innovation, Open Source, culture, hackathon, hackathons, innovation | No Comments »

Help us find a VP of Engineering and Operations at Rally in Boulder, CO

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Please help us find qualified candidates for an exciting new opening at Rally’s Boulder headquarters. With compounding user growth, seven agile teams, four product lines, two development locations, as well as multi-tenant SaaS and on-premise deployments, it is time for us to hire a VP to help us continue to grow and thrive.

We have managed with various folks playing parts of this role over the last seven years, and now we need to add a skilled, servant leader and operator to our senior team to enhance functional management across the software value-delivery chain.

This person will be part of our senior management team and be responsible for all technical engineering and operations. As a peer to our VP of Products and supported by Zach’s four product line managers, you and your teams will collaborate with these managers to advance the product portfolio components and overall strategy. This person will work with a world-class team of software, systems, operational engineers and scrum masters. Service Level Agreements (SLA) with customers will measure success in this role with the goal of increasing overall engineering resource development, mentorship and flexibility to meet evolving products, features, and architectural needs. Our intent is to continue growing this part of the business through organic, development partners and acquisitions.

A major part of personal success in this job comes from thriving in our culture of team collaboration, personal responsibility, high ethics, social give-back and intrinsic motivation.

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 as well as other benefit details. (If you are not quite ready to apply, but want to have a quick confidential conversation with the management team, please send email to vpengops@rallydev.com. No recruiters please). 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.

We are very excited to find the right addition to this agile engineering and operations group.

Ryan Martens is a the CEO of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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Posted in Agile Culture, Agile Development, Collaboration, Community, Kanban, Lean Software Development, Open Source, Quality Assurance, Scrum, Software as a Service, Sustainability, XP, innovation | No Comments »

Thank you Sun Microsystems for starting the Java infinite game

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

It has been three weeks since 50,000 friends and I converged in San Francisco to attend Oracle Open World. It was an amazing event with three giant vendor exhibit halls including almost every IT vendor in the world and a stunning exhibit of the NEW Oracle, called Complete.

As I reflect on this event, I realize two things:

I would not be where I am without Sun Microsystems and all the great things they did for me, Rally and our industry.
Oracle’s new “Complete” solution including enterprise hardware, enterprise database, enterprise middleware and enterprise applications is a very powerful story for the enterprise.

Thank you Sun Microsystems

sunLogo

As a result of Sun Microsystems’ engineering innovations and culture, I have had a great 15 years. Including:

Joined Tim Miller, following the first Java One in 1996, and helped grow a great company called Avitek that focused exclusively on Java development and was a Sun Authorized Java Center
Dreamed of having someone put a huge arrow through our building or assemble a VW in my office
(Avitek) getting acquired by BEA Systems because of the success of Java in the marketplace
Built BEA’s portal on top of WebLogic which drove $50 Million of contribution to the business in the first 12 months as Java on the server went mainstream
Built Rally’s multi-tenant solution using the large collection of skilled java engineers in and around Boulder and Raleigh
Read with pure joy, Citizen Engineer, written by Dave Douglas, Sun’s ex-Chief Sustainability Officer and Greg Poppodopolus, their ex-CTO
Got introduced and worked with Dave and Greg’s HR Partner Matt Artz
Will earn a sabbatical with Rally for seven years of service, based on Sun’s model and crafted by Matt Artz (can’t wait to share my sabbatical proposal in November)

I owe a ton to the infinite game that Sun was able to create by opening Java to the industry. Now as that jewel as well as other great and open technologies from Sun and BEA exist at Oracle, I feel confident Oracle will find a way to continue to evolve the rules and boundaries to create plenty for all.

Oracle Powerhouse

Now that BEA, Sun, StorageTek and a large collection of software application companies are part of Oracle, Oracle Open World has become quite an event. Like Apple’s hugely successful vertical integration of the desktop/handheld, Oracle has completed that integration on the enterprise server. Based on walking around all three exhibit areas, and attending many of the executive keynotes, you get a sense for Oracle’s growing influence in the marketplace.

Looking at the price, performance and energy saving virtues of both the exalogic and exadata machines from Oracle, it was easy to see the power of the combined vertical approach. The fact that those machines run open and industry standard Java and SQL makes this vertical integration strategy more interesting than Apple’s integration.

Oracle’s Fusion Application effort, a rewrite of all the applications, leveraging the common middleware components including Hyperion and Fuego, were very obvious in the booths. These new enterprise application components are available in a mix and match relationship with existing Peoplesoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Agile and Premavera applications. As a result, they seem to be managing the transition to Fusion without leaving a crack for competitors to break in.

On a side note from the technology, I really enjoyed the BMW Oracle Racing exhibit in Moscone North. If you have not seen videos of SLAM, the winner of 33rd America’s cup, you are missing out on some heart pounding thrills. I would love to be the helmsman of that thing while it was flying two hulls out of the water. I couldn’t resist buying a cool vest and getting my picture taken in front of the America’s cup.

In addition to attending the Leadership Circle events, I presented a keynote on agile software development prior to Ted Farrell, who is the Chief Architect and SVP of Fusion middleware and tools group at Oracle. The whole talk is available below and describes the linchpins to agile software development and how to leverage new technologies like Oracle’s Rich Enterprise Applications.

I hope you enjoy the talk as much I did. Many people commented about how the vivid model of making tomatillo salsa the agile way is now etched into their brain. I know it was nothing like the rock groups that played Treasure Island, but is was big for me.

Thank you Sun and thank you Oracle.

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

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Posted in Agile Adoption, Agile Development, America's Cup, Avitek, Citizen Engineer, Dave Douglas, Java, Open Source, Oracle, SLAM, Software Development, Sun Microsystems, Ted Farrell, Tim Miller, innovation | No Comments »

Rally’s week of culture and space “hackathons”

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

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.

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Posted in Agile Culture, Agile Development, Agile Training, Christopher Avery, Collaboration, Culture of Innovation, Open Source, culture, d.school, hackathon, hackathons, innovation | No Comments »

Balanced Metrics for Agile Enterprises – Net Promoter Score @ Rally

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Believe it or not, we talk about metrics here all the time. I bet it is the same around your near real-time, software-driven enterprise too. For Agile teams, the pursuit of good metrics and forms of feedback to steer their work is an obsession. I swear we have as many “quants” in this company as engineers, service or sales professionals.

At Rally, we currently track four categories of metrics in a kind of balanced score card of SMART numbers:

Employee satisfaction (see Colorado Best Company and Outside Magazine); We also use an on-demand 360-degree peer review system
Value Throughput (% of value demand versus failure demand, work in process, cycle time, services backlog and lead time, along with any awards and/or positive reviews)
Financial (Lifetime value of customer, cost of sales, breakeven point, bookings growth, renewals %, cash)
Current Customer Satisfaction (Control charts of cases and escalated cases normalized by user base)

NPS as part of your Agile Metrics

We are about to start measuring a new number – NPS. Ever since Tom Poppendieck exposed me to the Fred Reichheld’s book on Net Promoter Score back in 2006, I have been interested to see how a powerful tool like this could be applied to Rally.

The theory behind Net Promoter Score is, as the book’s title says, “The Ultimate Question” – measuring customer satisfaction. On Wikipedia, you can see the criticism of this measure versus other questions, but I really like the rigor and material available behind this approach. You can find success stories, along with blogs, additional resources and information about what makes up a good NPS on the NetPromoter.com web site. Of course, Net Promoter is just one of a balanced set of metrics to help understand performance, improvement and stakeholder value. We see NPS as an increase in discipline around customer satisfaction measures. For an Agile enterprise, those end-of-pipe measures become a great predictor of future financial performance and growth.

Iteration One of NPS at Rally

We decided it was time to measure NPS at Rally due to four factors:

our recent growth in staff, due to financing in late 2009
success in moving other customer metrics this year
the search for an over-arching metric around customer satisfaction
increased sophistication and capabilities in our IT environment and belief that the feedback can help prioritize strategic work for 2011

Our team started this effort as a skunk works out of IT. Once we completed our first iteration and understood how we would need to scale NPS, our IT team prototyped a solution in and between our instance of Salesforce and Eloqua. We then expanded the team to include support, customer advocacy and marketing. This team’s first goal was to get smarter by reaching out to other friendly SaaS vendors we work with who had implemented NPS. We are extremely grateful for the time that Nadia De Villa of Eloqua and Susan Gingrich of Readytalk spent with us to share their experiences. (This Readytalk blog post led us to Susan.)

The first phase of our NPS survey will go out this week. If you are one of the randomly selected customers who receive it, please take the 30 seconds needed to respond.

Our super-short survey will take maybe 30 seconds to complete.

We are eager to hear your feedback and ready to adjust things as necessary. If you can’t wait for our survey, please feel free to comment on this post or send me an email: ryan.a.martens@rallydev.com. We really want your feedback as we are trying to be a GREAT company.

Since NPS only measures customer satisfaction and we have to balance a portfolio of stakeholders, I am sure this will not become the one or “ultimate” number for the company. But, I am confident that this will become a part of the weekly corporate dashboard. If this is an interesting topic for folks, let me know and I will post follow-ups in the future. We would also love to hear about the experience of your team or company with NPS.

Ryan Martens is a tomato canner, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

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Posted in Agile Best Practices, Agile Culture, Agile Development, Fred Reichheld, NPS, Open Source, Tom Poppendieck | No Comments »

Rally in Raleigh; Success in becoming a Whole Cupcake?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

Did you know that some people pronounce Rally and Raleigh the same? It is also a tongue twister to say them together. These are two of the more esoteric things I have learned in the eighteen months following our acquisition of 6th Sense Analytics.

Five Fingers for a great Q2 and great North Caroline BBQ

This is in the forefront of my mind following a recent trip to Rally’s Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina office. After Agile 2010 in Orlando, Jean Tabaka and I visited our largest remote office in their new digs. We were there to help share in their Q2 Celebration event. It was a real pleasure to see that office filling out and becoming whole. (more on the cupcake thing below)

Becoming whole is so critical for a remote office and for an Agile team.

When I was working at BEA, I was part of an amazing machine that really knew how to acquire companies. BEA learned from Cisco about how to do this right and how to balance autonomy and culture to create a healthy soul for an office away from the corporate headquarters. Typically, BEA moved one or two folks to the remote facility to become active managers and help provide local leadership. These embedded people helped make the transition smoother by transferring norms, values and informal networks of the existing organization to the newly acquired team. In fact, BEA would not move forward with an acquisition deal unless it had management bench strength who were willing to move and play that role.

We compensated without management bench strength.

In Rally’s case, we did not have that management bench strength to move folks from Boulder to Raleigh. As a result, we lived through what some folks on the team called “open wheel racing.” We had a lot of rubbing and bumping. We struggled as Boulder team and Raleigh team tried to figure out the balance between autonomy and culture. And we were tackling this cultural bumping while working collaboratively on the same product and sometimes in the same code-base.

We knew we had to address the lack of local leaders from corporate and so we started with 3 specific practices:

We stuck with eight-week agile release cycles. This frequent synchronization really helped keep the wheels on both cars. To help jump start real collaboration for the releases, the Raleigh team flew out to Boulder for most of the release planning meetings in 2009.
Within the releases, we chose to develop a vast majority of the Raleigh code as a separate service running in separate application containers. This supported the Raleigh team having almost complete ownership of the functional value they delivered.
We added HD Video conferencing to support frequent meetings and open worm-holes to broaden communication channels beyond emails, IM, and phone calls.

Our next steps brought in additional agile team members.

Since the acquisition of 6th Sense in late 2008, we had a only a partial agile team in Raleigh. To complete the team, we added a development team lead and a product owner in Boulder. In 2009, the Raleigh team released Rally’s customized reporting service and time-tracking capabilities. Todd Olson’s ability to lead the Raleigh team in collaborating with the existing team in Boulder was yet another critical piece in our path to integration. Todd was the original founder of Six Sense and the spiritual leader from founding and past experience in ALM space with Together J and Borland.

Todd and his daughter enjoying one from the Cup Cake Shoppe in Raleigh

This summer, the office moved into a larger space to accommodate our hiring efforts in Raleigh. So far this year, we have hired or moved six new people into Raleigh and we are not done. Shameless plug – “In fact, we have 21 open positions at the company in Boulder, Raleigh, London and in the field.“ Part of the Raleigh growth was due to the AgileZen acquisition in April. In January, we were feeling good enough about our lessons learned with the 6th Sense acquisition to make that move. This time, instead of moving Rally people to where AgileZen lived, the AgileZen team moved to our Raleigh office. We found out about their intention to move during the negotiation process and it was a huge green light in the transaction. (Think like BEA above – makes balancing autonomy and culture much easier when the management bench can not support the acquisition.)

Based on some of the joy, happiness well-being and cupcakes! (These were no ordinary cup cakes, they were from the Cup Cake Shoppe – made famous by President Obama during the Healthcare debate. We found out the owner is a great lady as she even chauffeured our own Susan Ruh to the new office!) Jean and I witnessed all this during our Q2 celebration visit, Rally Raleigh has certainly taken strides to build a cohesive agile team in a period of growth and integration.

But, there is still more to do

We recognize that there are always items in our organizational backlog. As the Raleigh team continues to build the whole, we owe a bunch to the folks who were closest to the open-wheel racing process. They kept their cool, did things to build empathy for the other team and kept focused on delivering value. For Rally as a whole, we still have a lot to learn about running remote offices in a culture that is much more collaborative than what any of us witnessed in the last decade at BEA, Borland, Mercury, Quark, Rational, or Serena.

Please comment your ideas or experiences with remote offices and highly agile teams.

Ryan Martens is a tomato canner, school board member at Friend School Boulder, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development.

Ryan Martens original post

Posted in Agile Best Practices, Agile Culture, Agile Development, AgileZen, BEA, Cisco, Jean Tabaka, Open Source, Sixth Sense, todd olson | No Comments »

No Impact Man – A cool Gift

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Original Post by Ryan Martens

On Wednesday, I received a copy of Colin Beavan’s book called No Impact Man. I owe a big thank you to Michael Mah of QSM Associates for the gift. Michael and I have talked together at numerous Agile and Rally events over the past four years. His work has been instrumental at proving the benefits of Agile by benchmarking Agile projects against their database of 7500 projects. He has clearly seen me talk about my personal quest to get my family’s carbon and environmental footprint down, as well as our work at Rally on our corporate footprint.

My take away: As you share your personal or professional vision with others, it becomes easier for them to help you attain it. It is a wonderful reinforcing loop. Thanks again Michael.

(Click on Book to see at Amazon)

This is a book about Colin and his family, who live in New York City, and how they lived for a year with a zero environmental footprint, not just a zero carbon footprint. I have broken the cover on the Introduction and the first chapter. It looks like a great and funny read. Based on my Amazon search, there is even a movie/DVD on the book.

Here are some Chapter titles, to give you a bit of the feel:

What you think when you find your Life in the Trash
If Only Pizza Didn’t come on Paper Plates
Conspicuous Nonconsumption

I look forward to finishing the book on my next plane trip, which is coming in two weeks to the Oracle Open World/Java One/Oracle Developer’s Conference. I am speaking there on the “Linchpins for Scaling Software Agility.” This talk is on Wednesday morning in the San Francisco Hilton, right before Ted Farrell. Please join us both as we explore the needs and tools for team hyper-productivity.

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