The Agile Executive

A blog post can’t do justice to the richness and vibrancy of the dialogs that were produced by 80 participants in the September 17 Rally Agile Success Tour event in Boston. You had to be there in order to fully savor the experience. If you are a Boston Agilist who missed this gathering, the event in Chicago gives you an opportunity to catch up without needing to fly all the way to the forthcoming events in Seattle or London.

Agile metrics reported during the event were very impressive.  AOL’s Jochen Krebs indicated acceptance of user stories improved from 20% to 90% in one year! Sermo’s Rob Sherman provided the following three year data:

• 2007: 10 releases; 26 patches
• 2008: 29 releases; 32 patches
• 2009: 67 releases; 0 patches

(“0 patches” is not a typo – year-to-date “patches” at Sermo have primarily been about laying the required infrastructure for forthcoming releases to be deployed, not about bug fixing).

The quantitative data was nicely complemented by qualitative insights. ITG’s Heather Kanser’s work on the Virtuous Cycle of Agile and Constant Contact’s Rick Simmons contrasting Informational Metrics v. Motivational Metrics demonstrated ahead-of-the-power-curve thinking. 

One other thread that came to the fore during the event was Agile Business Service Management (Agile BSM). Think of it as the fusion of Agile methods for software development with state of the art practices for managing IT from a business perspective. Embryonic that this trend is, the potential impact is huge. We will discuss this emerging trend in forthcoming posts.

It is a pleasure writing this post!