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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.)

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.

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.

Ryan Martens original post