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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.