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 prioritization technique we’re developing to follow the money.
