Joe Little's
session was interesting.
Basically, you need to define what business value is for your
product and that definition may evolve over time.
I've always used the
chartering session to derive an
implicit definition for business value through the identification
of success criteria for the product. For example, we're currently
developing portals for a client and, since The Business considers
itself to be in an investment phase, what's valuable to them at the
moment is audience acquisition rather than revenue generation. (If
they can attract and retain users in the present deflated market
when it turns upward the revenue will be generated as a bi-product
of having acquired a large user base.) So, measurable success
criteria for the product are X registrations per month, Y page
views per month, Z unique users per month. And business value is
defined in those terms - registrations, page views, unique users,
visits, etc.
Joe suggested using business value points, similar to
story points , which are a
measure of the relative magnitude of value (and to use the
Fibonacci sequence to distribute
value across a scale). I like the idea and need to chew on it for
wee while but I'm thinking it could be useful in the prioritisation
technique we're developing for 'following the money'.
Friday, 8 August 2008
Agile2008: Discovering what business value is and what to do about it
Posted by Simon Baker - Permalink
