A common term in the agile community these days is VALUE.
- We increase value to the customer
- We manage the value stream in an agile and adaptive manner
- Our method allows the customer to receive increased value
- Blah, blah, blah
Enough theory how about some practice?
Information Economics
IE provides the means to analyze and select IT investments that contribute to organizational performance based on business value and risk to the organization. This is done by using business and technology domain factors.
Business Domain Factors
- Return on Investment
- Strategic Match
- Competitive Advantage
- Management Information Support
- Regulatory Compliance
- Organizational Risk
Technology Domain Factors
- Strategic IT Architecture Alignment
- Definitional Uncertainty Risk
- Technical Uncertainty Risk
- Information System Infrastructure Risk
IE provides the means to assess the cost and value that IT contributes to the business and technology domains separately. This provides an accurate assessment of the impact of an IT investment to the organization - the VALUE to the organization.
In a portfolio management context the Investment Review Board assigns a weighted score for each domain factor (Business and Technology) according to specific agreed upon criteria. The value of each project, feature within a project or collection of projects (program) can then made visible.
It's time to start having agile practices deliver on the promise of agile project management, agile enterprise methodologies and agile anything else. By deliver I mean deliver in the units of measure most common to the stakeholders of projects - dollars to the balance sheet.
