Why call it “BV Engineering?”

A man I greatly respect wrote to ask why I call it “BV Engineering.”  There are many engineering disciplines, he noted, but is there a degree in “business value engineering”? I said I thought an MBA was the degree for this. Not another regular engineering degree,  but I agree with him that for some the name is misleading.

But, this begs the question: Why do I call it “BV Engineering?”

Those of you who have taken one of my courses will of course know.  Those of you taking the BV Engineering workshop in Ottawa on Dec 8-9 will also learn (again) why.  And more.

But why?

Two reasons.

First, Scrum is a framework, and purposefully does not attempt to define the engineering practices that the team should use in building the product.   Scrum assumes that these engineering practices are not perfect, and assumes that the imperfections will show up in the Impediments List.  Also, when an impediment rises to the top, it will be fixed.

So, I want all the stuff around Business Value to be treated the same way. All the ideas, all the people, all the tools, all the process.  It needs to be continuously improved.  Items need to go on the Impediments List, then get fixed!  So, I want BV Engineering to be amongst the engineering practices we are continuously improving.

Second, we all have colleagues who have some wonderful ideas about Business Value.  Good, big concepts, and other ideas.

In addition, I want that to be wedded to rigor (or at least more rigor), discipline, and metrics.  Yes, metrics around BV are hard. Yet this is the only really important thing we do — deliver business value — so I think we should have some metrics, and be continuously questioning how good the metrics and the process are.  This is what they do in physics; so should we, in business.

To me, ‘engineering’ implies rigor, discipline, and metrics.

So, apologies if the phrase otherwise does not work for you.

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To see other posts about BV Engineering, just click on that category to the right.

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