AGILE IN ACTION

All our work items, both user-focused and technical, are stories framed in the context of a user interacting with the product. Each story represents a distinct, visible and testable piece of work that can be delivered independently to realize some value. Stories exist at many levels of specificity and never convey solutions. For example, at a point in time it's sufficient to use an ambiguous story to describe an interaction as simply an activity a user engages in using the product. At some time later, typically when detail starts to matter, smaller stories are written to describe that activity in terms of more specific tasks the user performs with the product.

We're working on a new Web site and we did some concept work to develop a brand that captures what we're about here at Energized Work. You'll see the visual brand when the site launches but I wanted to share what we've come up with on how we see ourselves. If you read this blog (or know us) you'll know that we're pretty straight-talking and say what we mean. When we wrote The Energized Way to describe how we work we used short, sharp, punchy statements. We wanted to use the same approach to capture our ethos. Here's what we came up with:

At Agile 2008, Luke Hohmann from Enthiosys talked about converting business value into actual money. Luke said prioritizing the backlog by ROI doesn't work and suggested developing attributes for backlog prioritization that drive profitable growth. In terms of what we've been doing at one of our clients using throughput accounting this means increasing revenue without significantly increasing investment and decreasing costs without impacting throughput (or the capacity to deliver).

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.

There's a company that makes shirts for men and women using one cloth-cutting machine and one sewing machine. The manufacturing sequence is the same. A single women's shirt is cut in 2 minutes, sewn in 15 minutes, requires fabric costing £45 and sells for £105. A single men' s shirt is cut in 10 minutes, sewn in 10 minutes, requires fabric costing £50 and sells for £100. The market's weekly demand is 120 women's shirts and 120 men's shirts.

What's valuable to a business? At the end of the day, the goal of every company is to make money. So, ultimately, a business values things that make it money. We should always do our utmost to deliver value to our business by giving it the things that will help it make money from its customers. But focusing directly on business value is not good idea. Making money is most definitely the goal but focus must be on the source of revenue - the customers or end-users. If a business focuses on the money it eventually does wrong by its customers and they go away and it makes less money.

Understand value from your customers' perspective. Zeithaml and Bitner define value as some combination of the following: Value is low price. E.g. the customer wants a bargain. Stop doing all of the activities that do not directly contribute to product value. Value is whatever I want in a product. E.g. the customer wants to experience owning an exclusive brand pair of trainers rather than just any old trainers. This is marketing. Value is the quality I get for what I pay. E.g. the customer expects more for his money. Value is what I get for what I give. E.g. taking absolutely everything in account, the customer considers a particular luxury car to be worth the money and the wait, if there's a delay in delivery. It's not just about the money. Structure your organisation and arrange your process so that value can flow from your company to your customer. Any activities that are not adding value for your customer are waste.

R&D expenditure can expensed or capitalised. When it's expensed, the total expenditure is declared as expense in the current period, reducing current profits by that amount. When it's capitalised, part of the expenditure is declared as expense in the current period and part is declared as expense in future periods, increasing current profits and reducing future profits. Capitalisation can provide a signal to investors about future benefits of current R&D projects, whereas expensing can reveal strategic information about R&D to competitors. I'm not an accountant and I admit there's much more to this than I currently understand, but I'm wondering if the motivation to use capitalisation is to give the perception of greater current profits. Is this short-termism?

W Edwards Deming said something like:

I don't like the pick-and-mix approach to agile practices (I'm talking about Extreme Programming and Scrum), especially in the name of pragmatism. What about the values and principles?