Posts Tagged ‘London’
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.
Scale in London – Part II
What a grand conclusion for a year of Agile Success Tour events! High that my expectations of yesterday’s event in London were, the actual delivery and interaction with the participants surpassed them. As a matter of fact, I have not done as many customer 1-1’s in any of the previous events. Some of the interactions were with folks who came to the event from the continent. Remarkably, various customers stayed after the event to spontaneously dialog with other participants.
Speaking for Memex, Jim Mccumesty established the tone for the whole event. Agile to Jim is about:
- Making a real difference
- Changing patterns of individuals and teams
- Transforming ‘life styles’
Have no mistakes – Jim had a lot of hard methodical and technical data that he shared with the audience. It was clear however that for Jim the whole things is about doing good things through Agile. His passion was contagious.
Trevor Croft viewed the decision to go Agile by Misys as a matter of fitting software methods to business circumstances. Agile was chosen to due to intrinsic characteristics of their Business Intelligence projects. Specifically, Trevor highlighted the following factors:
- BI requirements would be constantly dynamic in breadth and depth
- Needed to be quick to market from vision to delivery
- Higher revenue –> emphasis on innovation
- Break out of waterfall nexus of first trapping all requirements
- Highly modularized factory production line approach for delivery
Trevor’s good points resonated with the trend highlighted by other panelists – the emphasis in Agile is moving toward:
- Delivering the right products; and,
- Delivering innovative products
Paul Lazarus of SpilGames equated Agile with growth. At the heart of it, SpilGame’s fast expansion from Holland to Poland and China was characteristic of the role Agile plays in the knowledge economy. Projects flow to the teams and to the talent, not the opposite way around.
David Hicks gave impressive highlights from the Nokia/Symbian/RADTAC work on the Symbian operating system over the past ten years:
- >50 MLOC!
- In a little over one year they are reaching the level of >1200 software engineers Agiling furiously in >120 teams
- All these folks/teams on a single software product with synchronized release trains every 8-12 weeks
It is enlightening to combine David’s data with Dean Leffingwell’s reports on his experience at Nokia. The affinity of their insights is remarkable. Dean, in collaboration with Juha-Markus Aalto from Nokia, published an excellent paper on the subject. Moreover, Dean is actually ‘binding’ together his insightful blog posts to publish a new book entitled Agile Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise. The book will be published by Addison-Wesley in early 2010.
Much more could and should be written about the London event. Until I have the opportunity to do justice to the subject, I will just mention my overarching conclusion from the event. The business interest in Agile in both the UK and in EMEA is as strong as the one in the US, if not stronger.
Scale in London – Part I
No, this is not (yet) the report from the Rally Agile Success Tour (AST) in London. You will need to wait another week for my report from this forthcoming event. Rather, this post is to advise folks in the greater London area of a an intriguing thread we will be discussing in the Rally event there on Thursday, October 29.
The choice of companies for the event enabled us to offer participants the full spectrum of Agile scaling experiences, all the way to some 1,200 Scrummers on a single product in one case study. As a result, the richness of the forthcoming panel presentations is unprecedented. Time permitting, we will discuss the following subjects, and then some:
- Three-layer enterprise Agile model
- How to maintain integrity of a vertical feature when it has to be delivered by many Scrum ‘component’ teams?
- Bringing multiple teams and multiple SDLCs together on one workflow
- Cultural differences vis-a-vis Agile between Belgium, England, Finland, Holland, India, Israel, Poland and China.
- How do you accomplish Fully Distributed Scrum under the cultural diversity indicated in the previous bullet?
- The use of deep immersion techniques in Agile
- The Agile with the Masters paradigm
- How to maintain the push/pull balance?
- What limit should be placed on the Daily Commit?
- Emphasis on innovation – not “just” faster, better, etc.
- Advantages of Software as a Service (SaaS) in the Agile context
- How to tie the Agile initiative to strategic investment considerations?
- What was the ‘secret sauce’ of BMC’s Agile implementation? How can you apply it in your company/organization?
- What is likely to be the hottest frontier in Agile during the 2010-2012 period?
One other “ingredient” makes the London event very special. All previous events, gratifying and successful that they were, have been held in the US. The event in London will certainly be different from its US predecessors. In experiences, in interpretations, in points of view, in challenges, in business designs and so on and so forth.
I Look forward to meeting you in London!
The Agile Executive 