Mar
22

Thinking about Business Value

Alexander Nowak of the Microsoft Community of Practice of Cap Gemini Belgium has written a description of the tryout of the “Agreeing on Business Value with Systems Thinking” that will be re-run on April 1st at Mini XP Day Benelux.

In his post he describes the following main points:

  • Business Value is multi-dimensional and not always easy to express. The key lies in the measurability of things.
  • The “Business Value Model” is a technique to set the context of the “big” why and communicate this across the organization (small or big).
  • It is built around the concepts we are mostly familiar with (and borrowed from other techniques).
  • The “Systems Thinking” part comes into play to discover relationships between goals, capabilities, stakeholders and measurements and risks. When you turn a knob here, something will happen on the other end… and vice versa.
  • A business value model is not carved in stone. You must always evaluate if what is described (or better drawn) in the model actually reflects reality.
  • This visualization is important for communication. Doing the value exercise can be an eye-opener for the people in the project and/or organization.
  • The “Business Value Model” should be the origin for all user stories.

Yes. That’s it. Couldn’t have said it better myself 🙂

You can see the outputs of the workshop in a previous blog entry. Read more about it on the AgileCoach site.

Hope to see you at the conference!

Mar
01

Journée Agile 2011

I’ll present “Pourquoi, où et comment les méthodes Agiles marchent” at the Journée Agile 2011 in Brussels.

See you there on April 7th!