It doesn't have to be about business value

Recently, Mike Roberts said If it really was all about business value my life would be so much easier. I've consulted in organisations that had no idea what business value was, let alone care about it. So I can empathise with the situations Mike Roberts describes having failed, in early consulting engagements, to introduce the concept of business value to project stakeholders in order to facilitate the adoption of agile methods.

It struck me at that time, that it doesn't have to be about business value. I realised that just because an organisation isn't yet practicing agile methods doesn't mean that they won't already know what is valuable to their business. What's important is to understand exactly what the organisation does value and use that (rather than business value) to drive agile projects.

Update: William Caputo responds to Mike Roberts post and talks about Aligning values. He says that it's important to understand what a customer values and to align the development effort with the customer's desires, and not the other way round.


Tags: agile

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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