Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

We need an estimate of value of each story to prioritise our backlog. In some cases that’s pretty easy because the story will deliver a lot of clear business value, but at other times searching for any value is a lot harder, especially for a business team that thinks in terms of revenues and costs. I don’t know how many times I have heard ‘it doesn’t matter what order you develop it in, it’s all worthless unless it’s all there!’ Ok, I accept that you often can’t start making money or saving effort until you can go live and that may require a lot of the project to be completed, but that’s the wrong answer if we just need to establish which story to play next and we need 70% of them to switch the project on.

So how can we get business people to see value other than ‘pounds’?

We have come up with a two tiered description of value that seems to make it easier to understand.

‘External value’ is the easy to understand concept as it’s all about revenues and services delivered. This is usually acquired when software goes live and it’s usually related to why we undertook the project in the first place. This kind of value is easily understood by all stakeholders.

‘Internal value’ is something that can be used to benefit the project and although not as attractive as ‘External value’ is still highly desirable. Examples are reduction in uncertainty, ability to get feedback, increased confidence by the business or delivery team members or maybe an identifiable progress milestone. All of these don’t put pounds in the bank, but are easy to see will add to the projects ability to focus on achieving the ‘External value’ we are trying to achieve. When put this way, most people can see this kind of value and use it to prioritise stories.

By differentiating between the two classes of value, I have found it much easier to get people to look for value and find it where they wouldn't before.