Luke Hohmann’s Blog

I’ve concluded (sadly) that the winning entry for buzzword bingo at the Agile 2007 conference is “Business Value”. In some way I really shouldn’t be saddeded by this, as the alignment of development resources to business objectives is a hard, but attainable, goal, that is worth the effort. Still, I can’t help but think that most agilist teams are far too willing to accept that business value is defined as the prioritized backlog, without demanding that those who create the prioritized backlog do the necessary homework to ensure that the items on the backlog really do provide business value.

This is hard, but necessary, work. It involves (near) continuous collaboration with customers in an effort to discover how they value potential new features. It involves translating these learnings into insights that represent defined market segments.

It involves understanding the operations of your company well enough to justify internal improvements.

Perhaps more importantly, it involves the analysis of backlog items against a sufficiently rich, multi-dimensional set of pre-defined attributes, that allow the backlog to be prioritized to the true needs of the business. Direct financial attributes, such as IRR, NPV, and payback period are fundemental, but there are a host of others (alignment to corporate strategy, stakeholders, technical architectural care and feeding, maintaining competitive positioning, and so forth).

Creating solutions that deliver maximum business value should be the primary purpose of what every development team does, regardless of their process. Just make certain that your goals are set a bit higher than simply consuming items from the prioritized backlog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 3:28 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.