Comments on: Estimating Business Value

By: Capability Analysis - Start with Business Value

Capability Analysis - Start with Business Value — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:32:24 +0000

[...] for a change talks about estimating business value using a forced rank order [...]

By: Peter Gillard-Moss

Peter Gillard-Moss — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:02:33 +0000

Hi,

I’m definately in agreement: I blogged about similar ideas a while back:

* http://jupitermoonbeam.blogspot.com/2009/01/measure-for-measure-why-were-doing-it.html
* http://jupitermoonbeam.blogspot.com/2009/01/getting-measure-of-value.html

By: lizkeogh.com » Blog Archive » Business Velocity

lizkeogh.com » Blog Archive » Business Velocity — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:55:19 +0000

[...] Van Cauwenberghe has written a great post on estimating business value. I particularly like the idea of calculating business velocity, and showing value earned over cost [...]

By: Liz Keogh

Liz Keogh — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:29:35 +0000

Hi Pascal,

Thanks for the model; I’ll remember it for when a team needs to actually come up with some numbers (so far we’ve managed to avoid this!).

The reason I prefer “want” to “need” is for the same reason that we use “should” instead of “will” in BDD – it allows the goals to be questioned. I’ve been on too many projects where the business insisted that they “need everything”. With “want” we can also look at different options for achieving each goal; perhaps one stakeholder wants to engage users by allowing comments while another wants mini-games on the site.

Chris Matts also talks about the need to protect a differentiator; to provide a buffer so that competitors can’t spoil it as easily by copying our idea with less risk. Even if we have some stories that we “need”, I can see that there would have to be some minimum number of stories that we just “want” in order to create that protection.

It’s good to see someone else using another pull template anyway. Credit for Feature Injection goes to Chris of course.

By: Pascal

Pascal — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:10:37 +0000

Hi Alex,

I don’t “argue” the user story format. With the teams I coach we just use this new form, as it follows naturally from the way we work.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:08:39 +0000

Hi Pascal
Thanks for this useful post.
I totally agree with you about the benefits of having discussion on Business Value and including technical team in this discussion.
I’m not sure of the real benedit od changing the User Story format, not saying what you propose is wrong, but I don’t see a clear difference between the 2 formats.
During my training course, I always explain that the most efficient action is to define Acceptance Criteria rather than argue on the User Story format … and it seems that you chose the 2nd point ?

Cheers
Alex

By: Dadi

Dadi — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:10:35 +0000

Hi Pascal,

Thanks for a great post. To get a 10 from me all you’d need to to is to add a short example of using your alternative User Story format

Cheers,
Dadi.