Welcome the CA\rABU
Our bio reads: The spirit animal of the Agile Central R&D group at CA Technologies. Our views are our own.
But that’s a one-liner, a TLDR, a quick response, a fast explanation to someone who doesn’t have time to listen to us ramble on. So to introduce this blog, we’d like to take that time to ramble just a bit, and to fully explain the background and inspiration behind CA\rABU.
In May of 2015, our company, Rally Software, was acquired by CA Technologies. Any employee who has experienced the transition period of an acquisition can relate to the uncomfortable uncertainty you feel during this time. Before the acquisition, Rally was a company that not only built software for agile development teams, but was a place that lived, breathed and preached the Agile Manifesto. We became the first publicly traded B Corp in the United States, and won Best Place to Work four times (read even more). We won awards including Rising Star, Denver Post’s Top Workplaces, Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work, and many more.
You could spot Rallyers volunteering, presenting at conferences, playing softball in the rec leagues and enjoying a beer together on the porch at Sanitas Brewery on a Friday evening. Founders Tim Miller and Ryan Martens had built a family; one that worked hard and enjoyed it.
Does all that disappear when you get acquired?
For six months, little things changed here and there: we switched to Outlook, signs were replaced, a few people left for other opportunities, and we received new titles. Even our product name changed to CA Agile Central. Then the big news hit: both founding fathers were leaving.
So we asked ourselves again, is the Rally culture going to disappear? The answer was and still is: only if we let it.
A small group of us decided to take action, determined not to let an acquisition convince Rally employees that every reason they originally joined this company was gone. Even better, we wanted to embrace the change. Take what we had and push it into a new phase. Introduce the people behind CA Agile Central. So, we created CA\rABU and wrote our manifesto:
CA\rABU is:
- The spirit animal of the CA Agile Central R&D group.
- Our sense of creativity.
- Our ability to change and adapt.
- Our love for work and fun.
- Our voice.
- Life’s rhythms in our native environment.
This blog is a place for us to share our voice with those of you in the technology community. Through CA\rABU, you’ll meet the individuals who make up that voice. We hope our stories will inspire you to think big and to be agile in your company’s environment.
