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!