Category Archives: business value

Toward a general theory of business value

I presented yesterday at Agile 2008. Here is the link to the slide deck. I said more than is on the slide deck. Still, here it is. Two key ideas today. Business Value is about learning, as a team. BV is always changing (on many dimensions) and we learn, in part, to keep up with […]

The Nokia Test (5): A prioritized Product Backlog is essential

We started a series on The Nokia Test some time ago. This is the fifth explanatory post about the test. To find the others, search above (left), and here is the original post. The second item in the second section of The Nokia Test is this: There is a Product Backlog prioritized by Business Value […]

Your Business Case for Agile

My friends at Innovel have a blog entry titled “Build Your Business Case for Adopting Lean Agile.“ Take a look. As you try to get a revolutionary idea adopted, remember that you must always be selling the idea (see John Adams to the right). (Note: We didn’t have quite 50% of our countrymen agreeing, and […]

What’s a ScrumMaster Worth?

You may have noticed that some people are feeling a recession out there (these days). So, money can be a bit tighter. So, can you afford a good ScrumMaster? The answer is obviously yes. In fact, they are even in greater need (since there is greater urgency). Now, let’s unwrap this from a financial viewpoint. […]

Toward a general theory of Business Value

The title of this post is a little highfalutin, but it gets the idea across I hope. After many discussions with people about this subject, I find that the words “Business Value” tend to mean something very narrow to most individuals. For example, the words often mean, mostly: “the numbers we put on the story […]

Business Value and Money: Killing Low Priority Projects

This topic is leading somewhere. It may take a few posts to fully get there. First, let me say that in my personal opinion (and Peter Drucker’s and many others’) business is not mainly about money. Money is a measure, but it is not why we run the race. Business is about delivering satisfaction to […]

How to measure success on agile projects from a customer point of view

This topic is a thread on Scrum-Dev (the Yahoo list) these days. Excellent topic, with many good posts. Go and see. This is an involved topic, so I will give some views in this post and more later. I start with the word “measure.” I am concerned that we are measuring too many things (not […]

Business Value: Some useful links…

Here are some related links you may find useful: I like these principles of Lean, especially the first one, about specifying value. And I like this HBR article by Womack and Jones on Lean consumption: See what they call the six principles of Lean consumption. I call ’em a pretty good summary of what people […]

Business Value: What is it?

On Wednesday, I will lead a session on Business Value in Charlotte, N.C. The topic will be, “What is it?” This is Part 1 of the full session I will lead at Agile 2007. (Part 2 in Charlotte will happen on May 24, 2007.) My hypothesis is that we don’t know as much about Business […]

Google, Agile and Business Value

Google announced on 4/20/2007 that it earned $1.002 billion in the first quarter. The Net was up 69% from 2006. The sales increase was not too shabby either. Maybe it’s a company we can learn from. (Or maybe they are just lucky.) Google uses Agile. As I hear, Agile isn’t forced on anyone, and many […]