This year’s Agile Open Belgium will again be held in beautiful Gent, on May 21st and 22nd.

The Open Space format lets participants determine what’s on the program, how sessions are run and what they want out of the session. The conference location at IBBT provides several rooms, so that each session can run undisturbed by others while allowing participants to move easily from one session to another.

See you there!

I’m looking forward to return to Geneva to take part in the second Swiss XP Day. Last year’s event was a lot of fun.

This year, I’ll co-present “Agile Project Management in practice” with Portia Tung and I’ll help Portia run the “Coaching with the Wizard of Oz” Agile Fairytale.

La gestion de projet agile en pratique

Est-ce qu’il y a des chefs de projet dans un projet agile ? Qu’est-ce qu’ils font ? Quelle est la différence avec un Scrum Master ? Quelle est la différence entre la gestion de projet « agile » et la gestion de projet « normale » ? A travers des présentations, jeux et exercices nous vous proposons un ensemble d’outils et techniques que vous pourrez appliquer dès demain pour améliorer le déroulement et les résultats de vos projets.

Apprenez les techniques de coaching avec le magicien d’Oz

Pour pouvoir aider les autres (et soi-même) avec du coaching il faut mettre en pratique quatre activités :

• Poser les bonnes questions
• Écouter ce qui est vraiment dit
• Observer ce qui se passe vraiment
• Donner le bon feedback au bon moment

Le coaching est simple, mais pas facile. Quelque soit votre rôle dans l’équipe, ces techniques seront utiles pour améliorer chaque jour. Apprenez quelques techniques de coaching et mettez-les en pratique. Les personnages du Magicien d’Oz vous aideront sur la longue route de brique jaune vers la cité d’Émeraude.

A bientôt les amis Suisses et Français!

Couldn’t come to XP Days Benelux 2009? You missed a lot of great sessions.

Even if you did go to XP Days Benelux 2009, you missed several great sessions, because the program committee stupidly scheduled great sessions at the same time in each of the five parallel tracks.

Or maybe you want to send your colleagues to those great sessions you attended.

Well now you can, because 8 of your favourite sessions are being presented again at Mini XP Day Benelux on April 26th, 2010.

What’s in it for me?

You could learn more about

• finding the right question to ask to intervene on an individual or a team with Pierluigi Pugliese
• writing executable acceptance tests for real-world applications using Fitnesse with Pascal Mestdach & Michel Grootjans
• creating and improving an Agile office with Ralph van Roosmalen
• managing your backlog with Peter Janssens
• becoming a peer-coach and finding new insights for old problems with Portia Tung and the cast of The Wizard of Oz
• organizing and refactoring code with Matteo Vaccari & Antonio Carpentieri
• using Lean and Kanban techniques to increase teamwork and delivery speed with Machiel Groeneveld
• becoming a more effective Product Owner with Serge Beaumont

Mini XP Days Benelux remains the place to exchange ideas and share experiences about Agile in an open and relaxed atmosphere.

Don’t wait too long

Register quickly because the event is limited to 60 participants and the event usually sells out.

See you on April 26th in Kappelerput, just to the south of Eindhoven, near the Dutch-Belgian border (which might have an effect on the availability of beers…)

Juan Gutiérrez Plaza has contributed a Spanish translation of the Business Value Game. Thanks also to Leo Antolí and Thomas Wallet for reviewing this translation. Muchas Gracias!

You can download the Business Value Game in English, French and Spanish from the Belgian XP site.

I’m looking for useful and usable definitions of Business Value. Lean should have a lot to say about value (when they’re not talking about waste): Value Stream, (non-)value-adding work, Value Stream Manager.

And yet, a book like Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions that describes Lean Management doesn’t define what Value is or how you define it. The Lean Manager’s job is to ensure that the right thing is done the right way. “The Right Thing” has been defined beforehand and the Lean Production Manager ensures that the value (as defined in the product to deliver) is delivered quickly and efficiently. In production, quality has been defined and is constant (except when the product changes). The emphasis of the production manager is on “the right way” and increasing flow by reducing waste because those are the only variables the production manager (and workers) can influence.

Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash has a separate chapter on Value, which comes just before the chapter on Waste. The chapter doesn’t really define value. The closest to a definition of value comes from Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together. What do customers want?

• Solve my problem completely
• Don’t waste my time
• Provide exactly what I want
• Deliver value exactly where I want it
• Supply value exactly when I want it
• Reduce the number of decisions I must make to solve my problems

This gives us a good set of criteria to check, because each of these criteria reduces the customer’s value if done badly. How do we know what customers value? The advice is to understand the customer by:

• Living in the circumstances of the customer, for example when the chief engineer of the Siena minivan cruises from Canada to Mexico to understand how to improve the car.
• A similar technique is “apprenticing”, where we learn how to do the work from a user
• Observe real users at work
• Perform usability testing to ensure we haven’t reduced customer value

Toyota Way Value

If we look at the 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer from the Toyota Way (p. 37) we see that Customer and Value are only mentioned a few times:

• Generate value for the customer, society and the economy – Principle 1: Long Term Philosophy
• Quality for the customer drives your value proposition – Principle 5: Build a Culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time

So, Value == Quality for the Customer.

Chapter 5 describes how Quality for the Customer was defined for the Lexus.

• Look at who the competitors are
• For each competitor, what do customers like and dislike about them?
• Rank order the quality attributes
• Select a small number of target qualities (in this case: top speed, fuel consumption, noise, aerodynamics and weight)
• Define constraints and basic needs (reliability, safety, resale value, interior…)
• Set targets for each of the quality attributes

Now, we know that if we ask potential customers and users what they like in existing products and want to see in the new product we’re not going to get a very exciting list. In “Kano model” terms, we’re going to get the “must have” basic needs and some performance needs (“It uses a bit less fuel than my current car? Nice.”). Where do we get the exciter features that make the difference?

In this case the exciter was the word AND. The new car had to beat its rivals in all of the target qualities: lighter AND faster AND more fuel-efficient AND quieter AND… than the leader in each quality.

Toyota Production System Value

The Toyota Production System (and all the material derived from it) doesn’t say much about value because value has already been defined and is a constant (or constraint) for production. The Toyota Product Development System has as its first principle “Establish Customer-Defined Value to Separate Value-Added from Waste“.

How is this done?

• Appoint program leaders who have the background and experience to establish an emotional connection with the target customer
• Perform Genchi Genbutsu (Go See the Actual Work) to see the customer in action in their environment
• Create a vision for the product which includes quantitative and qualitative goals (using “Value Targeting Process”, as described above)
• Create a concept paper based on thorough discussion, information gathering and consensus-building
• The leader and the concept paper guide development throughout the project
• The project is broken down into functional teams, each with their own leader who applies the same process recursively, so that each team has a customer perspective
• Value targets are set
• Cross-functional teams work together to find ways to achieve all the value targets

Business Value is a Model

At Agile 2008, Chris Matts and Andy Pols had a session about Business Analysis. They made one statement which clarified what I was looking for and what I was doing:

Business Value is not a value. Business Value is a model.

There’s not just one value or one quality: different stakeholders all value lots of (conflicting) things. Moreover, value is not static. For example: whether I deliver a car (or a software project) next week or in six months can have enormous effects on your valuation of that exact same product.

As with all models, much of the value comes from the thinking about value and the modeling, not the final model. When I come onto a project, I will always ask about the Business Value Model. If you have an explicit and agreed model, decision-making will be much more effective. If you don’t have an explicit model, that tells me a lot: we’re going to have constant discussion about goals and value. Even worse, some teams have an explicit model (“espoused theory“), but use another model (“theory in use“) which leads to no end of conflicts and dysfunctional behaviour. I can usually deduce very quickly what the real model is from the actions of those involved. That’s why I like to add a third part to the statement:

Business Value is not a value. Business Value is a model. Business Value models what you value.

So… How can build a Business Value Model in our work?

Portia Tung and I will co-present the opening keynote “Pinocchio: On Becoming a Lean Leader” at the Agile Turku Day 2010 in Turku, Finland on March 17th 2010.

Come and play with us to sharpen your leadership skills!

So, if Value is relative to each person or organisation and their situation, before we can start definining Value we have to find out who’s value is important for our project. Who are we doing this for?

The Dramatis Personae

We start every project by finding out the stakeholders we need to satisfy. This, like all other agile analysis activities, is an iterative process: we start off with an initial set of stakeholders and update our list when we discover more information. We need to find at least three types of stakeholder before we can start talking about value:

• Client
• Customer
• User(s)

The Client

The first and most important stakeholder is the Client. The Client commissions or purchases the product we create. The Client is responsible for

• Setting the goals: “I need these results…”. The success of our work will be judged against the fulfilling of the needs.
• Setting the constraints and boundaries: “You can’t touch this…”, “You have to….”. The constraints and boundaries set non-negotiable acceptance criteria for any solution we might come up with.
• Providing the team with resources: money, skills, hardware, software, data, information…
• Defining the Business Values of the product in function of time. Value isn’t static, it changes with time. For example, a games that’s released in time for the Christmas holiday gift shopping, has a lot more value than one that’s delivered a few days later. A new version that’s available at a trade show is more valuable than one that’s delivered the day after.
• Resolve issues, remove impediments and manage risks for these areas of responsibility.

At the end of the day (project), it’s the Client who’ll decide if this project or product is a success. They define value and decide whether it’s been delivered or not.

Some other names for this role are: Purchaser, Buyer, Sponsor or Executive sponsor.

The Customer

The Customer works for the Client to fill in the details and content that will allow us to achieve the given goals with the given constraints using the given resources. The Customer is responsible for

• Setting intermediate goals which, when achieved, will let us achieve the Client’s goals. Achieving these intermediate goals will tell us if we’re on track to deliver the goals of the Client.
• Defining the features to be delivered to implement the goals.
• Defining the Business Value of features, within the context of the Business Value Model of the Client.
• Defining the Acceptance Criteria of the features that allow us to unambiguously determine if the feature is done because it achives its goal.
• Follow up the state of the work, verify that the resources are being applied well to achieve the desired goals.
• Resolve issues, remove impediments and manage risks for these areas of responsibility.

Some other names for this role are: Onsite Customer, Product Owner or Product Manager.

User(s)

I’m not too fond of the word “User”, but for now this word stands for those people who will use the product we’ll create or change. As soon as we’ve identified them, we describe them using their role, group, team or organisation name so that we’re rid of the ugly word user.

If we already have people using the product, we go and see them (“Genchi Genbutsu”) so that we understand what their context and needs are. If the product is new, we may have to invent personas (with the help of Product Management and/or User Experience) and imagine what their context and needs will be.

Discovering stakeholders with the Nine Boxes interview technique

The Nine Boxes is a simple (but very difficult) interviewing technique from the Solution Selling™ sales process. We ask questions about three topics:

• What problems and opportunities does the organisation face?
• Who is impacted by this situation? How are they impacted?
• What would a future in which the problems and opportunities have been dealt with, look like? What changes for those impacted people?

The answers we get from the “Impact” topic give us a first list of stakeholders. The person managing all the impacted people is a first candidate for the Client role.

You can download the Nine Boxes game from the Agile Coach site. Try it, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Once you master this technique you can get a lot of useful information in a short time.

Discovering stakeholders by going to the Gemba

Interviewing gives us a lot of useful information, but we don’t believe everything we’re told. Going to the place of work (“Gemba”) and seeing the work being done allows us to verify what we’ve been told and discover a whole lot more useful information. You can try two simple observation techniques:

• Stand in a circle: you draw a circle on the ground and stand in it, for at least an hour. Observe what’s happening. Note things that go wrong. Note causes of things going wrong. Note ideas for improvement.
• Staple yourself to a work order: select a client request and follow it through the process to really experience what happens in a process (which might be very different from what you’ve been told should happen).

While you’re at the workplace, take the time to talk to the people doing the work.

That’s just the start!

We’ll discover more stakeholders as we go along. These three stakeholders (with at least one type of user) are the minimum to even start to talk about value. Yet, surprisingly many projects I encounter lack one or more of these stakeholders. Agile projects typically have the Customer role, but they have problems fulfilling their responsibilities because the two other stakeholders are unclear:

• If it’s not clear who the users are, if we overlook some types of users or if we only pay lip service to the notion of customers (like on the “agile” project where for the past five years nobody in the team had actually seen a user using their product) selecting the right User Stories and defining their value (to prioritise) becomes difficult. Next time you have trouble setting priorities or selecting stories, ask who the users are and what their goals and needs are.
• If it’s not clear who the Client is, we don’t have a clear view of the overall goals and needs. We don’t have priorities between different stakeholders’ goals. We don’t have a Business Value Model that tells us what the value of the product will be. Next time you have trouble defining the Business Value, ask who the client is. Who takes care of the responsibilities of the Client? The Client decides if your work is successful, so you’d better know who that person is and what they define as success.
• If there’s more than one person in the Client role, your project will be troubled by endless fighting, shifting priorities and many changes. The Client is one person who has the authority and knowledge to take the necessary decisions. If there are arguments about value and priority, ask who will deal with this risk.
• If the appointed Client doesn’t have the authority and control over the whole area you’re working on for this product, you’ll be mired down in endless debates and requests with those who have the authority. Either reduce the scope to the span of control of your Client or find a Client with a larger span of control.

Whenever I look at a project, these are the first three questions I ask:

• Who is the Client?
• Who is the Customer
• Who will use what the project makes?

A large number of project problems and project failures are caused by not having an answer to one of  these three questions.

When we have the answer to these questions we can start to ask questions about value.

Note: Dealing with constraints and boundaries

I always find constraints and boundaries worth time investigating in depth

• Constraints that mandate certain features often lead to complaints from the team as they have to implement “zero value” features. These kinds of features are “Table Stakes” or “Must Be” in the Kano Model: the whole product has no value unless those features are there. For example: in a regulated industry, all the work and deliverables to pass a required audit may not seem to have a value, but they are the price to pay to be in that market. We can include these kinds of features in two ways: additional stories (for example: “TO assess what needs to be tested AS A certifying authority I NEED a list of changes in the release with their architectural impact“) or as Acceptance Criteria that apply to all User Stories (for example: “Is this User Story’s design documented in the architectural impact document?” ). How do we prioritize these stories? Simply, they get no business value but get marked as Table Stakes. When planning, these go to the top of the priority list.
• Constraints that mandate certain technologies to be used may put undue limits on our creativity, but can make good sense: if the product is to be maintained by the Client’s organisation it should use technologies with which the Client’s people are familiar.
• Being able to break through constraints or boundaries can create an innovative and unique product. Systems Thinking and Conflict Resolution techniques can be very helpful here. Always question constraints, boundaries and the assumptions behind them!

Let’s have a look at how others define (Business) Value

Before starting to find stakeholders and discovering what they value, let’s have a look at what other people think of Value. Because real Customers don’t come to us, we can have a look at what customers might read.

Understanding Organisations

“Understanding Organisations” by Charles Handy doesn’t contain any orginal ideas but does give an overview of a lot of economical and social theories about organisations and the people in them.

However, the index doesn’t have an entry for “Value” or “Business Value”. It doesn’t even have an entry for “Customer”! The chapters on “Designing the Organisation” or “The Future of Organisations” never once mention customers.

Wow. Just wow.

The Table of Contents isn’t very useful either: Part Three consists of “Chapter 1″ to “Chapter 12″. No chapter headings or titles to help me find the information I want.

Next!

Competitive Advantage

“Competititve Advantage” by Michael Porter is one of those classics that businesspeople just have to read. Summary: in a typical four-quadrant model, Porter shows that there are four generic competitive advantage strategies:

• Cost Leadership: become the low-cost producer in your market. This allows you to have the lowest prices and/or the highest margins. If other companies in the same market try the same strategy, a price war ensues.
• Differentiation: seek to be unique in your industry along some dimensions that are widely valued (aha!)  by buyers.
• Cost Focus or Diffentiation Focus: the same as above, but focused on a narrow segment of the market.

Porter uses the concept of a “Value Chain”, where primary and support activities within the organisation together create value. Different Value Chains are connected in a “Value System” as the outputs of one organisation’s Value Chain create the inputs for another organisation’s Value Chain.

In competitive terms, value is the amount buyers are willing to pay for what the firm provides them. Value is measured by total revenue, a reflection of the price a firm’s product commands and the units it can sell.

The book touches on the importance of “Buyer Perception of Value”: it’s not the “objective” value delivered (whatever that is), but the buyer’s subjective assessment (based on incomplete knowledge) that’s important.

The price premium a firm commands will reflect both the value actually delivered and the extent to which the buyer perceives this value.

Therefore it’s important to know who the real buyer, the real decision maker, is and how they define value for themselves and their organisation. Because the Value Chains of seller and buyer are part of one system, an important part of delivering value is knowing how the seller Value Chain impacts the buyer’s strategy for their Value Chain. The book never uses the word Systems Thinking, but thinking about Value Chains organised in a Value System is a start.

I’m not too fond of the Value Chain concept with its fixed “Primary” and “Supporting” activities. It all starts to get a bit messy when we break the organisation into multiple Value Chains with common supporting activities and we get into Activity Based Costing territory. We do use value-delivering and supporting business processes in our analysis.

EVA and Value Based Management

A more recent book (2001) about “EVA and Value Based Management” by S. David Young and Stephen F. O’Byrne posits that there’s only one relevant type of value: Shareholder Value, not company value or customer value.

Shareholder Value is based on Economic Value Added (EVA = net operating profits – cost of capital). Market Value (the value shareholders care about) is then the invested capital + the capitalized value of current EVA (based on the estimate that the current EVA level will be maintained) + the capitalized value of expected EVA improvements (based on the estimate that the company will improve their EVA in the future). That’s a lot of estimates.

Simply put, as companies outperform or underperform EVA expectations, investors convert these surprises into value.

If Shareholder Value is the only reasonable measure, then Value Based Management is very simple: tie executive compensation to EVA. If the executives’ wealth is aligned with the company’s (shareholders’) wealth, the executives will implement strategies that increase this wealth. The actual strategies to follow are left as an exercise for the student. It turns out that things aren’t quite as simple as they sound, even when the risks that the authors acknowledge are taken into account.

… short term finance measures, including current EVA, are relatively less informative about managerial effort expended in areas that are most useful to long-term value creation.

Anyway, for our purposes this definition of value is unusable. The book acknowledges this measure can only be used at the top and then only as a lagging indicator. The solution is to use Value Drivers, a set of financial and non-financial measures which will lead to the desired results. These Drivers must include both current situation and future growth to avoid a focus on the short term. The important point is to take a Systems Thinking approach:

… the two most important success factors in implementing a balanced performance measurement system are whether top managers have clearly articulated the firm’s strategic vision and whether they have identified the key performance indicators for measuring the success of that strategy…. there must be a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the measures that are chosen and the company’s strategy.

Danger: measure the right things, the right way. Some tips from the book:

• Clearly articulate a strategic vision, consistent with the goal of creating value
• Seek input not only from internal sources but also from customers and suppliers
• Let measures evolve over time, as conditions and strategies change
• Link key measures to all levels of management compensation
• Cascade measures deep in the organisation
• Cap the total measures reported to top management at 20 or fewer
• Report key measures at least on a quarterly basis, preferably on a monthly basis and even more frequently if information technology allows [ed: ditch the information technology if it doesn't allow this ]

The book is very much financial/accounting oriented. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by the use of “Working Capital Requirement” (WCR), which includes in capital (and thus capital costs) lots of things that traditional accounting would consider as assets (inventory, unpaid invoices). The financial analysis shows how shortening total cycle time decreases WCR and dramatically improves profitability. As Taichi Ohno said “All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value-added wastes.” And you get improved quality and reliability as a bonus!

The Toyota Way

In contrast to the short-term stock market focus, “The Toyota Way” describes how to “base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy even at the expense of short-term financial goals“.

The Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America mission is:

• As an American company, contribute to the economic growth of the community and the United States
• As an independent company, contribute to the stability and well-being of team members
• As a Toyota group company, contribute to the overall growth of Toyota by adding value to our customers

A balanced view, where the survival of Toyota is based on satisfying customers and stakeholders both inside and outside the company.

User Stories Applied

Closer to home, how does the Agile literature deal with Business Value? “User Stories Applied” by Mike Cohn has no index entry for Business Value and only one for Value. Discussing the “INVEST” criteria for User Stories, Mike refines the “Valuable to the Customer” criterion to “Valuable to Purchasers or Users”. Why the distinction? The Purchaser (the person who buys the software) may have additional requirements that aren’t expressed (or even visible) by the users of the software. In the same section, the book says that User Stories must be “Valuable for the Customer and the users”. The best way to ensure that this is true is to let the Customer write the stories.

I see a few problems with this:

• Who is the Customer (who writes stories) and what is their relationship to the Purchaser? We define two roles: the Client (a bit like the Purchaser) who’s responsible for overall goals, resources and constraints and a Customer who’s responsible for the content that achieves the goals with the given resources and within the given constraints.
• There are more people, roles, teams, organisations (in short: stakeholders) affected by a project/product than just the purchaser and the users. How do we ensure that we discover and deliver what they value? We systematically  discover all the stakeholders so that the Client and Customer can take their needs into account.
• What is Value? We explicitly define value(s) for each of the stakeholders, based on their goals.
• Does a purchaser buy software? Do we sell software? That’s an unfortunate point of view of many in the Agile community, strengthened by the “Working Software over comprehensive documentation” line in the Agile Manifesto. First of all, we deliver a product which may contain software, documentation, training and a lot of other stuff. The purchaser sees value in the whole, not the software bit. Secondly, purchasers and users don’t care about software (which might be a reason they don’t come to conferences where we talk about software or why they hate coming to iteration planning and demo meetings). They care about capabilities and results: what will they be able to do (better) when they get the product? When can they get it? What’s it going to cost? We talk about benefits for the organisation and its stakeholders, measurable results and complete products with our customers.

What have I learned today?

• Value is relative to each person or organisation and their situation
• Organisations and projects have lots of stakeholders
• Therefore, we will have to consider many values
• Those values must be balanced and have a systemic link with the organisation’s goals so that we get early indications that we’re (not) on the right track
• Having an explicit, clear and simple Business Value model helps decision making to reach our goal
• Most of our stakeholders don’t care about “working software”, they care about achieving their goals. Our goal is to give them the capabilities they need to achieve their goals
• Therefore, to achieve our goal we need to understand our stakeholders, their organisations and their goals
• Value has
  • financial and non-financial components
  • a short term and long term horizon
  • quantitative and qualitative aspects
• We need whole-system thinking to pull this off.

What have you learned today?

Portia Tung and I will co-present “Solve Conflicts Without Compromise with the Conflict Resolution Diagram” at the SPA 2010 conference in London on May 19th 2010.

Come and play with us to sharpen your problem-solving skills and come up with real solutions to a difficult choice you’re facing.

The Systems Thinking materials for this session are available on the Agile Coach site.

Portia Tung and I will co-present “Pinocchio: On Becoming a Lean Leader” at the SPA 2010 conference in London on May 18th 2010.

Come and play with us to sharpen your leadership skills!

The previous blog entry said that we should find the Business Values before writing user stories. Once we find the Business Values, we derive the User Stories from them.

That just raises more questions:

• What is Value?
• What is Business Value?
• Why more than one Business Value?
• Where do we find the Business Values?
• How do we derive User Stories from Business Values?

Let’s look at the first three questions and come back to the last two later.

What is Value?

The Institute of Value Management defines value as “…based on the relationship between satisfying needs and expectations and the resources required to achieve them” and “getting what you require for what you will pay“.

Jerry Weinberg (in “Quality Software Requirements volume 1“) says that “Quality is value to someone”.

Robin F. Goldsmith (in “Discovering Real Business Requirements for Software Project Success”) says that “A requirement describes some value we need to deliver to someone”.

So… if we “deliver value” we’ve satisfied a need or expectation of someone at a price they were willing to pay. We’ve provided someone with a benefit for a reasonable cost.

What is Business Value?

Wikipedia defines Business Value as “…an informal term that includes all forms of value that determine the health and well-being of the firm in the long-run” and notes that it goes beyond purely economic value.

Some theories (like “Shareholder Value“) try to reduce the different forms of value to one measurable value. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. An organisation is a complex system that’s impossible to reduce (or manage) with one measurement or goal. There will always be many (sometimes conflicting) goals, we might as well have these in the open.

Other theories like “Balanced Scorecard” try to strike a balance between 4 different views of the organisation.

Why more than one Business Value?

Because every definition of quality, benefit or value includes the term “…for someone”. We have different stakeholders with different goals and needs. They all have their definition and view of value. That raises two more questions:

• How do we know who the relevant stakeholders are?
• How do we find out what their goals and needs are?

Four views is better than one. But you’re likely to have more than four stakeholders for your project, so you’ll have more views.

Definining Business Value

Business Value may well be an informal term, but I like to define Business Value a bit more formally at the start of a project. That’s what we call “Business Value Modeling”:

• Identify the relevant stakeholders
• Identify their needs and goals
• Agree on how we measure/test the achievement of the needs and goals
• Select the (few) most important measurements and tests, the “Value Drivers”
• Define the relationship between the Value Drivers.
• Use the Value Drivers to focus and prioritise our work, from start to finish.

It’s important to define the relationship between the Value Drivers. E.g. we may have both “profit” and “customer satisfaction” Value Drivers. Which comes first? If we find a way to increase our profit at the expense of reduced customer satisfaction, would that be acceptable? There is no right answer. It depends on the company, the project and the circumstances.

Why agree on a Business Value Model at the start of the project?

Because the Business Value Model models what your business values.

The selection drivers and defining their relationship is bound to be a difficult conversation, but it’s one we want to have early on. If we don’t have this conversation from the start of the project we run the following risks:

• Continuous discussion about priorities pulling the project hither and tither
• Hidden priorities and values influencing decision making
• Trying to “keep everyone happy” with compromises. Why not solve the real conflict and increase both profit and customer satisfaction? Because we’re afraid of conflict and because compromises require less work
• Starting too many projects at the same time, trying to keep every customer happy.

How does your organisation prioritise projects or features?

Some organisations seem to value customer conflict avoidance above all else, leading to such unhealthy prioritisation schemes as “the customer who shouts loudest” or “the customer who shouted last” get to the top of the list. Sometimes a seemingly irrational prioritisation scheme hides some perfectly understandable values.

For example, in one company, the official strategy was to deliver product releases that contained a good mix of benefits for our customers all over the world. In reality, some customers (who happened to know the phone number of the CEO) always got their feature requests bumped to the top of the list. These customers all came from the same region. This had a negative effect on customer satisfaction and consequently sales bonuses of the salespeople in the other regions. Of course, sales bonuses were another powerful and hidden value driver for product prioritisation. Everybody knew this; nobody talked about this.

If we had had an in-depth Business Value Modeling conversation, we would have come to the following business value driver:

The needs of our “old” customers come before “new” customers, because their loyalty to us has allowed us to build this business

These old and loyal customers all had the CEO’s phone number, because they’d become customers long ago when the CEO did sales himself. They were all located in the same region because that’s where the company first started selling its products. Taking good care of your loyal customers is a perfectly valid business strategy, but because it was never articulated it created a dysfunctional prioritisation process.

More questions

We end with more questions than we started with. That’s a sign of a good analysis process

• How do we know who the relevant stakeholders are?
• How do we find out what their goals and needs are?
• Where do we find the Business Values?
• How can we measure/test those Business Values?
• How do we agree on the importance of Business Values?
• How do we derive User Stories from Business Values?

Let’s come back to these questions later.

What is your definition of Business Value?

At XP Days London I attended an Open Space session on “Estimating Business Value”. Ironically, it was hard to hear the other people in the working group because of the noise generated by the working group next to us discussing “Agile isn’t solving our customers problems because they’re not here“. Yup, we were discussing business value with not a customer in sight or any idea on how we could involve them in the discussion.

The topic of the session was

How do we estimate the Business Value of User Stories?

We didn’t get much result from the discussion. There’s no writeup on the open space wiki. I don’ t know if the organiser of the session got anything out of the session. I didn’t.

First of all, the session never defined what “Business Value” is. That’s the topic of a later blog post.

Secondly, I don’t think you can get a good answer to that question because it’s the wrong question.

Why is this the wrong question?

Because it presupposes that we first write User Stories and then estimate their value.

If we don’t know the value of the stories, we risk writing a lot of low (or zero) value stories. And many teams do. We write lots of User Stories in the hope of discovering the high value ones. We end up with a lot of stories that then have to be prioritised, valued, estimated and managed. Portia taught me a colourful description of this result: a Vomit of User Stories.

What are the consequences of a Vomit of User Stories?

We spend a lot of time on them:

• user story telling meetings
• user story cost estimation meetings
• user story value estimation meetings (that’s the meeting where we force our product owner to put a value number on the user story)
• user story planning meetings

Just to decide what gets done in the next iteration.

If we estimate and track tasks, not stories, we need to add

• task breakdown meetings
• task estimation meetings instead of story estimation meetings

Add to that

• an iteration retrospective
• a mid-iteration review
• a show and tell meeting
• daily standup meetings

Meanwhile, there’s “backlog grooming” going on. It’s a wonder anything gets done in an iteration!

Indeed, I’ve heard many managers and developers of companies that have started with Agile complain about the many meetings. They feel that they’re not getting much done.

So, what’s the correct question then?

How do we find the User Stories that deliver the Business Values?

That presupposes a different process: one where we first define what Business Values we intend to achieve and then generate those User Stories that contribute to the Business Values.

That should be a no-brainer, right?

• We first decide what values (or benefits) we want to achieve before lauching a project or product
• Then we find and improve the business processes that deliver that value
• Then we find and improve the supporting business processes that make the value-delivering processes possible
• When the team needs user stories, we take the highest value processes and break them down into user stories at the right level of granularity for the team’s needs. The team pulls the stories, so we only generate a minimal set of user stories.

The User Stories that implement those business processes clearly contribute to the business values, otherwise we wouldn’t even have considered them.

What’s the value of an iteration?

We keep talking about value and business value, but for our customers there’s no value delivered by iterations. They see real value when the product (and that’s not just software, despite “Working software over comprehensive documentation”!) gets released into the hands of users. Iterations (more correctly: timeboxes) are a useful project management tool, no more.

What’s the business value of a story?

I don’t think it matters much.

Why do you want to know the business value of a user story?

• It’s no longer needed to eliminate zero or low value user stories, because we don’t create or consider them at all.
• Another use could be to prioritise user stories by business value in a release or timebox. If we’ve already prioritised the business values and the processes that deliver them, we need to make sure the processes are implemented completely. So, I’d schedule user stories in such a way as to finish the high value processes as soon as possible and have as few processes in progress as possible. Other considerations, like dependencies, constraints, risks and real options, will weigh much more heavily when scheduling.

Why else would you want to know the business value of a user story?

I see no need to put a Business Value number on User Stories.

In the end, the customer doesn’t care about the allocation of user stories to timeboxes. They care that the selected business values are delivered in the release.

Asking the right question

Before we can find the right User Stories, we first need to ask our customers

What are the business values, the benefits, you need to achieve with this project or product? And how will you know you got them?

So, instead of inviting your customers to XP Days, why don’t you go to them and ask some questions? Asking questions is simple, but not easy.

Do you know what values your work is going to deliver? Do you know how your work delivers those values? If not, why are you doing this project? Why are you being paid?

You’d think that asking questions is easy. Most of us have been doing it since we’re small children. Why is it that most people (me included) are so bad at it?

Nowadays, we start many of our conference sessions and training courses with an interviewing exercise. The exercise is very simple:

• Participants work in triads and rotate through the three roles
  • Interviewer asks questions
  • Interviewee answers questions
  • Observer notes what is being done and said. The observer is also the referee who checks that the other two players follow the role.
• We set a topic that is known by the interviewee and not known by the interviewer. For example, the current or previous project of the interviewee. That actually makes the game easier. It’s harder to play the game if you know the interviewee or what they’re talking about.
• During a short timebox (a few minutes), the interviewer asks questions. Only three types of questions are allowed:
  • Open questions allow the interviewee to tell their story. Questions like “What does your company do?”, “What project are you working on?” or “What does your product do?” are good opening open questions. The best open question is “Can you give me an example?”
  • Control questions let the interviewee fill in the facts of the story. Questions like “How many people work on the project?”, “How long is the project expected to run?” or “Where do you work?” allow the interviewer to get to the data behind the story.
  • Confirmation questions let the interviewer check that they understood the interviewee. “If I’ve understood correctly, <restate what you heard in your own words>. Am I right?”. If you get a “Yes” answer, you can go on to the next part of the interview. If you get a “No” answer, you can ask the logical next Open question: “Can you tell me what I missed?”

It’s a fun game. You can download the instructions and a cheat sheet from the Agile Coach site. The game is based on the “Nine Boxes” technique from Solution Selling.

It’s too hard!

The feedback from the players and our observations show one thing: this is too hard! Interviewers have trouble following the rules and observers don’t have the courage to interrupt the interviewer when they don’t follow the rules.

In those few cases where we have someone who can actually ask questions in this format, the interviewees always remark how they feel that the interviewer really understood them. Usually, the interviewee gets some new insights.

It is hard, but it’s worth it.

How not to ask questions (a non-exhaustive list)

• Closed questions push the interviewee in a corner where they can only answer Yes or No. It’s really hard to get useful information using only boolean answers. Typical conversations go like “Is it X? No. Is it Y? No. Is it Z? No!!!” If you like to fish, go to a lake.
• Leading questions (or even better, Entrapment questions) lead the interviewee to give the answer the interviewer wants to get. “When have you stopped beating your wife?” is a classic example.
• Discourses disguised as questions allow the interviewer to speech on their favourite subject. Sometimes they even add a closed question at the end. By then nobody knows what the question is about. The goal is to let the interviewer talk more than the interviewee. I don’t know why, but I associate this type of question with university professors or inhouse gurus.
• Rethorical questions don’t really expect an answer, they have a point to make. “Are you going out wearing that?”. “Well… Maybe I’d better not. What do you recommend?”

My favourite most hated type of question (and one I use and hear too often) is the Pretend Open question. The typical form is like this: “Is it X or Y (and here the interviewer remembers they should ask open questions) OR…?” You can just hear the trailing dots. The question is long, unclear and weak. Advanced users will introduce many OR options, so as to maximize their airtime.

Help me get better

If you hear me ask any question that doesn’t fit the Open/Control/Confirm format, please correct me.

So, what did you think of this blog entry? Was it useful or just a reminder of something you already do or something you can’t use or….? Are you getting annoyed yet? Oops!

And it gets harder

Another observation from the game: hearing and seeing is also very hard. When we ask the observers to tell us what they heard and saw, we ask them to only answer with “I saw…” or “I heard…”. Most observers answer with “I think…” or “I feel…”.

When we teach people to interview and observe they “rediscover the lessons they learned as children but have since forgotten“. Maybe we should hire children as business analysts and consultants. For them all of this is natural.

Last week we organised XP Days Benelux and I’ve just about recovered from it. It was fun, as usual, and participants seemed generally happy with the event. You can see for yourself in the reports, participant retrospective and session feedback.

There are also a lot of things which could be better. The organisers are already busy setting up a retrospective and next year’s events.

A full report will follow later.

If you’ve written about XP Days Benelux, let us know. We gather all the reports on the conference website.

If you have any feedback or ideas for improvement, let us know. Even better, join the organising committee and realise your ideas.

Organising a conference is fun even if you’ve never done it before. There are enough experienced organisers to pair with. It does take some time and effort, so make sure that you’ll be able to invest in the conference. In return, you get the chance to take part in a non-IT Agile project.

This year, I participated in two stops of the Agile Tour in France: Besançon and Lille.

In Besançon I presented the “Résoudre les Conflits sans Compromis“. In Lille I presented the “A l’aide! Mon processus m’étrangle“. The participants of the Conflict Resolution in Besançon did a session retrospective.

This is my conference retrospective

What Went Well

• Both conferences were relatively small (fewer than 100 participants) with three tracks, so that it was possible to meet many of the participants and the audience sizes weren’t too large.
• A mixture of foreign and local presenters. Although, in Lille the presenter from Toulouse was more foreign than the one from Belgium
• Participants to both workshops happily played along and told me they had learned some useful techniques.
• Going to lunch and dinner with local agilistas and hearing about their challenges and successes.
• I’ll be back soon in Besançon.
• I hope I’ll be back soon in Lille, and this time not just as a train stop between London and Brussels.
• Participating in Christophe Thibaut’s well-rehearsed and interactive Haskell kata and going off the cliff with him as we “implemented just one more small feature” because we took too big a step and failed to really let the tests drive the code.
• Participating in Olivier Albiez and André Dhondt’s Pomodoro simulation.
• 15 participants for the Conflict Resolution session.
• 8 participants for the Theory of Constraints session is just enough to run the simulation.

What Went Wrong

• My French could be better. It’s sometimes hard to switch between Dutch, English and French from one day to the next. “Today is Friday, this must be France.”
• Not being able to talk with all the participants I wanted to talk with.
• Only 8 participants for the Bottleneck session.
• Forgot to bring Belgian Chocolate to Besançon, so got lots of “What Went Wrong” feedback.
• My eyes hurt during the Haskell kata session in Lille, probably because of the lighting in the low-ceilinged meeting room.

Puzzles

• What’s the real state of agility in France? It seems that there’s less uptake than in the “Anglo-Saxon-oriented” countries (UK, the Flemish part of Belgium, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Finland). Why? Is the language a factor?
• Where are the French-speaking Belgian Agilists hiding? I know only three, but there must be more.

Lessons Learnt

• It’s not an Agile Coach session if it doesn’t contain chocolates and sweets.
• The “Resolve Conflicts without Compromise” session works in French too. That means I’ll have to translate the materials in French.

Merci aux organisateurs, orateurs et participants. Et, qui sait, à l’année prochaine?

When presenters propose sessions for XP Days Benelux, we always recommend they try out their session, as many times as possible. We should all know the power of iteration and feedback. You need some time to get it right. If you’re slow like me, you might need years to get it right.

The first tryout of the “Solve Conflicts without Compromise” session was run as a “Birds of a Feather” session several years ago at the SPA conference. The session (and the technique) worked, but only barely. Then, two breakthroughs happened at the same time:

• I attended Christoph Steindl and Christian Federspiel’s Conflict Resolution session at Agile 2008 in Toronto
• I read Bill Dettmer’s “The Logical Thinking Process“

Suddenly, the technique became a lot clearer. Bill Dettmer’s explanation is very clear and practical; the session at Agile 2008 showed that it worked and could be fun.

Solve Conflicts without Compromise

So, after a few more iterations, an updated session was created. It’s now been run twice:

• At  Agile Tour Besançon, in French. The participants gave a lot of useful feedback at the retrospective.
• At the Scandinavian Agile open space, in English. The pictures show the three groups analysing a conflict for their “customers”. There was no time for a retrospective, because the conference was closing. I hope the three clients will blog or email me about their experience.

The next two runs will be at the Belgium Agile/XP User Group meeting on November 5th 2009 and at the XP Days Benelux conference on November 24th.

So, what are the 7 steps?

1. Create a blank Conflict Resolution Diagram (CRD) like in the image below. 5 boxes connected with arrows. Easy.
2. Articulate the conflict. State the problem in one of two forms, both impossible choices between conflicting prerequisites:
   • One chain of reasoning says “DO THIS”; another chain of reasoning says “DON’T DO THIS”. Now I have to choose: DO THIS OR DON’T DO THIS? I can’t have both.
   • I need two things, A and B, but they’re mutually exclusive. Now I have to choose: HAVE A OR HAVE B? I can’t have both.
3. Determine the goal and requirements on each side? Why do we need those two conflicting things? Because of two requirements. Why do we need those two requirements? Because we need them to reach a common goal.
4. Evaluate the reasoning. Throughout the whole exercise we must ensure we maintain clarity: is each step in the reasoning crystal clear and well-understood by everyone? Is the reasoning clear?
5. Develop underlying assumptions. If the CRD says “To achieve X we need Y”, ask “Why do we need Y to achieve X?”. All the answers are the underlying assumptions of the reasoning. Use “extreme wording” to make the assumptions stand out and almost beg to be invalidated. For example: “Why do we need to introduce Test Driven Development to achieve better quality?” Because…
   1. TDD is the only way to improve quality
   2. TDD is the most fun way to develop software
   3. TDD catches all errors
6. Evaluate the assumptions. Which assumptions are valid? Which assumptions are invalid? Which assumptions could be challenged. If there are no valid assumptions behind a step in the reasoning, the reasoning is invalid. At this point, the whole conflict may have “evaporated”.
7. Hard: Create injections. This is the creative bit where we find ideas to invalidate those assumptions that hold us back from creating a win-win situation, one where we achieve our goal in a way that satisfies everyone involved.

Why is this difficult?

When I see the participants in action, there are some difficulties that appear every time:

• It’s hard to maintain the consultant’s stance and only ask questions. That’s why we have strict rules about what the consultants can do: they can only ask a limited set of questions.
• We want to jump to the solution immediately without taking the time to understand the real problem. That’s why the session doesn’t allow talking about solutions, only about problems.
• We censor our assumptions. Instead of brainstorming all our assumptions, we only talk about those that seem reasonable. That’s why there’s a lot of pressure in the session: you have to come up with at least 25 assumptions in 5 minutes. That’s just not possible if you think about the assumptions.
• The most interesting assumptions are those that we no longer think about, the things that are “common sense”. That’s why we have people external to the problem questioning the client and why we bring in some “fresh blood” with a fresh perspective halfway through the session.
• It hurts when we really think about a problem. It’s easier to just settle for a compromise. That’s why we can’t accept any solution where one of the involved parties is not completely satisfied with the outcome.

What’s in it for me?

• The CRD provides a structured method to investigate a difficult conflict and channel our creativity.
• You don’t have to settle for compromise and mediocrity. You can get what you really need.
• It’s a lot easier to bring about changes if everyone affected benefits. As Machiavelli noted: “You will only get lukewarm support from those who will benefit from the change and strong resistance from those who stand to lose”. What if there were no losers?
• Your projects can deliver more business value per cost if you can find the breakthrough ideas that make those painful tradeoffs (or more correctly: horse trading) between stakeholder goals unnecessary?
• You can get more sales if your competitors offer “EITHER/OR” solutions and you can offer “AND” solutions. But first the customer has to regain hope that a solution is possible. Going through a CRD exercise with a customer and offering to invalidate all the assumptions that cause their conflict is an offer they can’t refuse.

What do I need?

• A bit of time. Most participants got several ideas to resolve their conflict within the 90 minutes of the session.
• Some simple materials: pen, paper and plenty of Post-Its
• The willingness to think hard
• The openness to share all assumptions
• The courage to challenge every assumption, even those that are “holy” or common sense. Especially those.

It’s simple, but not easy. The question is: do you want an easy life or a meaningful life? That’s the choice you have to make.

Oh! “Easy OR meaningful”? That sounds like a conflict! Why can’t I have both?

How would you evaporate this conflict?

Bring a conflict to the session and come out of the session with several ideas to turn this conflict into a win-win situation. If you don’t have any conflicts, you can learn how to help others solve their conflicts as a Systems Thinking consultant.

Come and learn how we’ve applied the Toyota Way management principles to introduce Lean and Agile methods in such a way that the companies can sustain the change.

Come and play to discover the Theory of Constraints and the “Five Focusing Steps” to really improve processes. Experience how and why Agile, Lean and Real Options work.

Customer Value Analysis is the name we came up with to describe the process we use to derive User Stories and Acceptance Criteria from project and company goals. It’s nothing new, it contains a lot of tried and tested Business and Functional Analysis techniques. It’s incremental and iterative, so that it’s a perfect frontend process to “feed” an Agile development team. It’s pull-driven, so you can keep your team fed with high value User Stories, just-in-time, when they need it and in the form they need it.

We’ve seen many projects where the Onsite Customer or Product Owner became the bottleneck, as the development team’s velocity improved. Customer Value Analysis contains the process and techniques we’ve used to exploit and elevate the analysis bottleneck and subordinate it to development again. Now the development team can continue to improve, because the Customer can keep up.

The companies where we’ve applied Customer Value Analysis are always suprised by how much value their teams can deliver. How do they do it? They

• Identify the high value needs
• Derive the leanest possible implementation that satisfies the needs, by taking small steps and really understanding the situation
• Challenge constraints and assumptions to find breakthrough solutions
• Describe the solutions with User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
• Do this efficiently, reliably and repeatably

Come and play with us!

Portia and I deliver a series of Customer Value Analysis training sessions, organised by emergn in London. You can expect a hands-on, fun-filled and very intensive session where you can learn and experiment with all the techniques on a real project.

The next training course is on the 3rd and 4th November 2009 in London. See you there!

If you’re interested in a session in Belgium or your country or company, let me know.