Agile finances?

I'm currently interested in getting financial skills into agile teams because I think better value for money can be achieved if the team has these skills and is made responsible for its own budget. I'm also keen to see an iterative approach to contractual payments, investments and budgeting. Rather than spending 300K in 1 large purchase, why not break it out into 10 30K purchases, paid on the delivery of concrete results, which may vary depending on empirical feedback? Without empirical evidence at the start, it's worth fixing the cost of the initial purchase.

To get some background, I'm looking into techniques for measuring the resultant value of delivered software, the cost of delivered software and the return on investment. I'm currently reading Software By Numbers with interest. At the Agile Business Conference I attended Tamara Sulaiman's session on Agile EVM. Tamara said EVM doesn't measure business value, it manages progress against a plan in terms of technical performance, cost and scheduling. She also said Agile EVM works best with estimation units of relative magnitude, like story points, rather than time-based units.

I need to read more and better understand the theories, but I'm going to try applying Agile EVM to a release on my current project. I'd like to see what numbers come out and what they're actually telling me. I'm also going to try some of the stuff in Software By Numbers.

Tags: agile evm

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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