BVPs, Fun, and the Game

March 21, 2022

Topic: BVPs, Fun, the Game, and Transparency

I will lead the discussion of this topic on Thursday (March 24th, 2022) at Agile-Carolinas. 5:00pm – 7:00pm EDT Online this time. (In-person next time.)

What is the topic?

Here are a few ideas that give you some hints.

I advocate for Business Value Points. And the use of Wideband Delphi voting on the BVPs.

It’s not perfect, but a good guess done quickly. Useful for learning.

BTW, business value is important. And hard to understand.

I also advocate for Story Points.

This includes a whole bunch of practices (similar to BVPs). Some good discipline. Learning. And the acceptance of imperfect (although improving) information.

SPs have been misused. Maybe better to say: managers have put teams “under pressure” in a useless way. And this is a key part of why SPs are disliked by many.

Hence, we do it with Planning Poker, which should be fun.

If you ask people to estimate and then commit (and Scrum rules say this), then you must make it fun.

Hell, life should be fun.

But, given the feeling of pressure that so many in our product development industry have, we must make it fun.

And they probably won’t do BVPs and SPs well UNLESS they are having fun.

The Game

I am enjoying March Madness. Always have enjoyed college basketball.

Scrum is a game.

Yes, March Madness is pressure. A lot of pressure for the kids. But that’s all part of the fun.

And part of growing up is learning how to handle pressure.

In Scrum, we make the whole thing a game. And each Sprint is a game. And we TRY to win each game.

Transparency

Many things to say on this topic.

But here: Winning or losing each game is transparency. We commit, and then we either fulfill or do not fulfill our commitment (no working outside the timebox of 80 hours over 2 weeks…that extra time is NOT permitted in the game).

And that transparency helps us learn and improve.

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This will be a discussion. I will have some slides. But key to the success of the evening is t he discussion. People disagreeing, people with questions, with agreeing. So, bring your own ideas and experiences. Let’s discuss.