Agile2014

Teams that forego a disciplined approach to calculating business value are leaving money on the table. Yet many scrum teams do just that; they measure velocity effectively as a way to improve team productivity over time, but rely on very soft qualitative methods to determine backlog order.



Business value exists at the intersection of what the market wants, what teams can actually implement, and what the organization is passionate about. It should be an explicit Product Owner consideration, determined in a consistent and useful way. Calculating business value quantitatively:

• Eliminates most internal stakeholder disagreements and enables faster, clearer decisions

• Allows the Product Owner to systematically test assumptions about the product, customers and the market to improve value delivery over time

• Enables accurate forecasting of both feature delivery AND value delivery as part of an agile release plan



This session will explain the sources of business value to different organizations, present a spectrum of methods for calculating business value that range from quick and simple to precise and quantitative, discuss how to weigh the tradeoffs between speed vs. rigor in an agile context, demonstrate one method (Net Present Value per point) on the highly-quantitative end of this spectrum, and illustrate the expanded capabilities this quantitative approach provides to the Product Owner.



Participants will be able leave the session and implement many of the methods discussed, or at a minimum use the vision outlined as a tool to move down the spectrum towards a more effective value estimation method.