BV Points – 1

January 31, 2021

QUESTION

Hi Joe – reading your ARP book, and you talk about BV and highest number is 100.

But, what is the harm in using regular 1,2,5,8,13 Fibonacci numbers for business value?

I do get when you find R that it will be lower. R = Bv (5) / SP (5) would mean an R of 1.

It would also means you could end up with decimals for things like 5/8. Here’s the scoop, the bank actually has a good planning poker tool that I would like to use for BV the tool uses 1,2,5,8,13

Thoughts? Craig

REPLY

Yes, I guess you could use any number range.

I use 100 as the number for the BV reference story.

One of the main reasons is that everything else is a percentage of the 100. A vote of 37 (avg) means that that card is 37% of the BV of the Reference Story of 100 (BV points).

The numbers I prefer to use for voting are an extension of the series: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144.

So, one can vote higher than the 100. And I finding it fairly normal that the voters later find one or two cards that are higher (more BV) than the one they chose as the Reference Story.

I do put them under some time pressure to pick the Reference Story (for BV), so this is not surprising.

For the R Factor, yes, I kind of like getting bigger numbers: a 2, 5, 10, 20, 40. But that is not essential.

For fractions, I suggest using one decimal place. These numbers are NOT that precise.

The Pointingpoker.com tool that I am using these days allows you to change the number sequence that you are using. AND, it does the averaging!!! Yay!

Follow-on questions or comments?