How do you know you are delivering value?

How do we know we’re delivering value or having the intended impact?

Presented by Kevin Burns1-27-2017

[email protected], @kevinbburns

Open Discussion

Who’s measuring value, outcomes, and/or impacts today?

How are you measuring them?

If you’re not measuring them, why not?

Who’s measuring cost?

How are you measuring cost?

[email protected], @kevinbburns 2

The 1st Agile Principle

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

(should we change valuable to beneficial impact?)

How do we define value (impact) and how do we measure it?

Not all Projects (or Features) are created equal.


Is value determined by delivery on time, on budget, and on scope?

Is the scope delighting the customer?Are they using everything we delivered?


In a survey of 4 products, 65% of the features were rarely or never used.

How much money could have been saved if we never built them?

In the Waterfall project world, we have to ask for everything we can think of because capital will end at the end of the project. Instead we should be asking what has the most value in terms of the business outcome and/or impact and how are we going to measure it.





Assumptions Challenged

• 3 things we wish were true

• Customer knows what they want

• Developers know how to build it

• Nothing will change along the way

• 3 things we have to live with

• Impact isn’t known until software is used in production

• Developers discover how to build it

• Many things change along the way


Marty Cagan Quotes

• Customers don’t know what they want. It’s very hard to envision the solution you want without actually seeing it.

• At least 2/3 of our ideas are never going to work. The other 1/3 will take 3-4 iterations to get right.

• The role of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. Product, design, and engineering work together to arrive at optimal solution.



What we measure is changing

Business CustomerPO, SM, BL

Software EngineeringAD, DD, DA

UserUX, BA, QA, SME

BusinessValuable

Design Usable

TechnicallyFeasible

INNOVATIVESOLUTION


Lean Startup

• Are we asking what are Minimum Viable (Valuable) Product and how do we know when we’ve delivered it?

• Use a scientific method to measure, learn and pivot or preserver.

• Use meaningful quantitative objective measure to evaluate impact.

• Can you use A/B testing?


MVPInnovation

UserUX, BA, QA, SME

Business Valuable

Design Usable

Software EngineeringAD, DD, DA

Business CustomerPO, SM, BL

Use scientific method (measurable) to learn

and discovery your Minimum Viable

(Valuable) Product (MVP)

Technically Feasible

MVP innovations emerge from Conversations


Impact-Drive Development



Value and/or Impact driven culture

• Are we measuring the Cost vs Benefit at all levels of our work items?• Portfolio

• Program

• Project

• Feature/Capability

• Story/Requirement

• Tasks/Test

• Are we measuring the Impact our features have on our customers?

• The act of sizing helps us define done and what the really valuable work is

• Use story telling and test statements create understanding of value and DoD


Multi-month

Monthly

2-weeks

Leadership T-Shirt Sizing

X-S 1 SprintS <1 monthM 1-3 monthsL 3-9 monthsX-L >9 months

Team Planning-Poker Fibonacci Sizing

(1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100)

Team task hours to capacity (2,4,6)

Solution Decomposition Sizing Pattern

Sizing our CostThe act of sizing helps us

understand what’s valuable to deliver.

Scope doesn’t grow, our understanding does.

[email protected], @kevinbburns

18

Deliver 100% of 10% of Project

• Can we incrementally deliver value and test it’s impact?

• Can we create incremental release plans to deliver 100% of 10% of project?

• What constraints do we have in working this way?

• Can we overcome or work within these constraints and still deliver incrementally?

• What/who is preventing this approach?


Create Faster Feedback

• When queues and batch sizes are large feedback is slow

• Slow feedback hurts quality, efficiency, and cycle time

• Feedback speed has enormous economic leverage in product development, but it is rarely explicitly managed


The Front-Loaded Lottery

• A lottery ticket pays $3000 to winning three digit number

• You can pick the number in two ways:• Pay $3 to select all three digits at once

• Pay $1 for the first digit, find out if it is correct, then choose if you wish to pay $1 for the second digit, and then choose if you wish to pay $1 for the third digit.


Value of Feedback

100%

Spend $1

Savings = $0.90Savings = $0.99

10%1%

0 $1 $2 $3

Probabilityof

Occurrence

Cumulative [email protected], @kevinbburns 22

Sequence Work Correctly (Cost of Delay)

• The sequence in which work is processed is called the queuing discipline

• By changing the queuing discipline we can reduce the cost of a queue without decreasing the size of the queue

• Since manufacturing has homogeneous flows it always uses FIFO (First-In-First-Out)

• For the non-homogeneous flows of product development other approaches have better economics


Use FIFO for Homogeneous Flow

First-In First-Out

Cost of

Delay

1

2

3

A

B

Time

Co

st

Delay CostLast-In First-Out

Cost of

Delay 1

2

3

A

B

Time

Co

st

Project Duration Cost of Delay

1 3 3

2 3 3

3 3 3


Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) for Non-homogenous flow

High Weight First

Cost of

Delay

1

23

AB

Time

Co

st

Delay Cost

Low Weight First

Cost of

Delay

A

B

Time

Co

st

Project Duration Cost of Delay

Weight = COD/Duration

1 1 10 10

2 3 3 1

3 10 1 0.1

1

23

160 796 % Reduction in COD


Paul Ellarby example

1. Create Method for measuring Value

2. Understand the value and cost of each portfolio down to the feature level

3. Allocate Value Points across feature/capabilities

4. Track Value vs Cost for each iteration

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/how-do-you-measure-value


https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/how-do-you-measure-value

How to measure anything – Douglas Hubbard

http://www.howtomeasureanything.com/[email protected], @kevinbburns 27

http://www.howtomeasureanything.com/

Measurement Basics

• A measurement is an observation that quantitatively reduces uncertainty. Measurements might not yield precise, certain judgments, but they do reduce your uncertainty.

• A good object of measurement is something that is clearly defined and it’s observable.

• Uncertainty is the lack of certainty: the true outcome/state/value is not known.

• Risk is a state of uncertainty in which some of the possibilities involve a loss.

• Much pessimism about measurement comes from a lack of experience making measurements. Hubbard, who is far more experienced with measurement than his readers, says:• Your problem is not as unique as you think.• You have more data than you think.• You need less data than you think.• An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.


Apply Information Economics for Decision-making

1. Define a decision problem and the relevant variables.

2. Determine what you know.

3. Pick a variable, and compute the value of additional information for that variable.

4. Apply the relevant measurement instrument(s) to the high-information-value variable.

5. Make a decision and act on it.


Selecting a measurement method

To figure out which category of measurement methods are appropriate for a particular case, we must ask several questions:

1. Decomposition: Which parts of the thing are we uncertain about?

2. Secondary research: How has the thing (or its parts) been measured by others?

3. Observation: How do the identified observables lend themselves to measurement?

4. Measure just enough: How much do we need to measure it?

5. Consider the error: How might our observations be misleading?


Tools




Questions & Next Steps

• How many of us know what business/user outcomes and impacts we’re trying to achieve on our projects?

• Do you have metrics in place to evaluation our progress/success outcomes and impacts?

• Who want’s help creating some objective measures?

• Where do we go from here?
