The Art of Business Value

by Mark Schwartz

vacillation,

I would like to suggest that the conflation of business value, customer value, and user value is outdated and well out of step with current Agile practice. As with requirements in general, we can no longer think of business value as something known and understood in its entirety before the team begins its work. More importantly, we cannot think of business value as something determined outside the team by something called the business and then simply presented or “tossed over the wall” to the team in the form of user stories, prioritization, and feedback on product as it is produced. The responsibility for understanding and interpreting business value cannot be placed solely in the hands of a product owner.

And if the success of an Agile project is to be determined by the value it delivers, then we have to think of that value in terms of outcomes, not completed stories, and measure it as such. Releasing code is not the same thing as delivering business value; to know that we have delivered business value, we must both understand what business value is and be attentive to outcomes.

tautological

In his 2011 blog post “The Elephants in the Agile Room,”7 Philippe Kruchten tells of the signers of the Agile Manifesto returning to Snowbird, where the Manifesto was drafted, ten years later to discuss the difficulties they saw in the way Agile had been adopted. The thirteenth “elephant in the room,” according to Kruchten, is that business value is “mentioned everywhere, but not clearly defined, or pushed onto others to resolve.” Perhaps this is also related to the twelfth elephant they listed: “Abdicating responsibility for product success (to others, e.g., product owners).”

If we build an elegant Continuous Delivery pipeline that harmonizes Development and Operations and continually checks its own health by feeding back from production, we have accomplished . . . what, exactly? It depends on what business needs we push through that pipeline, and what business value results from that. DevOps is form without content until we address the question of what goes in to the pipeline and what happens when product emerges at the other end.

I believe that the major lessons covered in an MBA program can be reduced to two principles: There is a time value of money. A business venture needs a sustainable competitive advantage.