Posts Tagged ‘Agile BSM’
The Success of the Success Tour
We started the 2009 Rally Agile Success Tour (AST) Series in March in Denver, CO; we just concluded it in London, UK. In between the AST “train” stopped at:
- Atlanta, GA
- Boston, MA
- Chicago, IL
- Los Angeles, CA
- New York, NY
- Santa Clara, CA
- Seattle, WA
- Washington, DC
All in all we hosted about 1,000 participants in these cities. More than 40 panelists shared Agile experiences with their local colleagues. Some 200 meetings were held with various participants in conjunction with the events. Obviously, I cannot write here about the level of business generated by the success tour, but none of my Rally colleagues complained so far…
The breadth and depth of topics that were covered is mind-boggling. Here are a few of the most intriguing ones:
- Agile Business Service Management
- Agile contracts
- Agile Governance
- Beautiful software
- Lean
- Sausage Syndrome
- Software capitalization
- Use of emulation in Agile projects
- Virtuous Cycle of Agile
- Why Agile is natural for Business Intelligence
The success tour proved successful to a degree that actually perplexed me for quite some time. I had certainly expected a strong series of events from the outset and could point out to various things we were doing right along the way. Yet, the very simple ‘secret sauce’ that made the event series so remarkable eluded me until I collected my thoughts for writing this post:
The Agile Success Tour proved phenomenally successful because the Rally team is so much like the customers and prospects that participate in the events, license the Rally software and work hand-in-hand with Rally coaches.
A few words of explanation for what might seem on the surface like a somewhat banal statement. The various members of the Rally team – sales reps, coaches, technical account managers, marketing professionals and execs – resonated with participants in the events due to exceptionally high level of congruence in values, thinking and practices. If Ryan were the CTO of eBay he would probably have licensed Rally software; Jean would have re-architected the flow of eBay processes; Zach would have integrated the ALM tools eBay uses. As for Lauren, she would have single-handedly created a world-wide marketing events organization for eBay.
The power of being like your own customers is magnetic. Digital Equipment Corporation was immensely successful selling minicomputers to engineers like their own engineers in the 60’s and 70’s. Sun Microsystems rode the early Internet wave as their product designers were carbon copy of the folks who roamed the World Wide Web. Apple triumphed with the iPod because just about every Apple employee would have murdered for such a cool device. Nothing beats the intuitive understanding that comes with designing, marketing and selling the kind of product you will buy, play with and use yourself.
After the Santa Clara event, Forrester’s Tom Grant told me the following about Rally:
What a smart company – everyone gets it!
Though a slightly different perspective than mine, Tom had actually identified the outcome of the company-customer congruence I am highlighting in this post. Everyone at Rally gets it due to natural identification with his/her customers. Contexts and experiences of customers are exceptionally well understood and often replicated in Rally’s Boulder, CO headquarters and its various branch offices.
Fundamentally, the success of the success tour reflects the affinity between Rally and its clientele.
The Case for Agile Business Service Management
BSM Review has just published my article The Case for Agile Business Service Management. Here is a key para from the article:
During turbulent times such as the past year, Agile business service management enables the business to become more competitive by speeding up the pace of delivery of new functionality and accommodating changes in business requirements as part of standard operating procedures. Like a computer chess program that extends clever tactics into the strategic realm [The New Yorker 2005], it compensates for the lack of prolonged periods of techno-economic stability through business Agility, substituting speed, flexibility and momentum for traditional long range planning. It is particularly noteworthy that Agile business service management applies equally well to companies pursuing adaptive strategies as to those betting on shaping strategies [Hagel et al 2008].
As indicated in a previous post, the article outlines the research agenda I will be pursuing. Specifically:
- How is agile BSM implemented and delivered? …measured?
- What are the benefits of agile BSM to the business objectives of development? …ops? …test?
- Who carriers responsibility for agile BSM delivery and implementation?
- Who benefits from agile BSM delivery & implementation?
- How are these benefits applied?
- When is Agile BSM expected to be understood and accepted by the business entities?
- Where is agile BSM likely to be wholeheartedly implemented first?
- What is the impact of Agile BSM on ISV’s (as distinct from IT “shops”)?
Listeners to Live Recording of Four Principles, Four Culture, One Mirror are well aware of my view of scaling downstream – it is the most tricky of the three dimensions of Agile scaling (up, out, downstream). IMHO Agile BSM is the first step toward effective scaling downstream.
Richness and Vibrancy in Boston
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:
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2007: 10 releases; 26 patches
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2008: 29 releases; 32 patches
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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!
The Agile Executive 