Business Value Game workshop in Tampere

I participated in the fifth agile dinner which was held as a workshop hosted by Artem. It was about ordering product backlog items (things to be developed) by the value they produce to business and the learning method was to simulate real life by a game.

Team I participated did not win, but I think we improved our method quite well. Initially, we did not schedule features (with a price tag), but tried to prioritize individual user stories (one feature consisted of multiple user stories) by ordering them according to decreasing ratio of value and cost (effort). Value of each story was, in the first technique we used, determined by feature price equally distributed to stories involved. This seemed reasonable, but resulted in multiple features in progress, and incomplete features gave no income.

We improved the method to use the following rules

1. Make a guaranteed release as soon as a feature is complete. Do not let the variation in velocity to cause a release to be skipped.
2. Prioritize full features (all related stories together) in decreasing order of business value (price) divided by effort.
3. You should take account things like customer satisfaction in business value.
   

This worked quite well. However, I am still not sure if the we should prioritize according to pure business value only. In our rules above, taking effort into account will deliver largest business value possible with the resources available in each sprint, but not necessarily the most valuable features first.

I insisted on having a set of rules for playing the game. That probably made us lose some money in the first rounds. Also, we did not have rules for customer satisfaction or strategic moves like abandoning some customers in favor of others. Intuition might have worked better this time. Also, we did not schedule small items to fill the remainder of sprints with useful work, which would have yielded a small speedup for some features occasionally.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Agile+Dinner+in+Tampere+20090514+-+Business+Value+Game+Workshop

Agile Dinner in Helsinki

I participated in Agile Dinner in Helsinki.

I gave a talk on a failed project of mine. It handled two problems encountered in the project, namely inability to match schedule expectations and eventually failing to meet the customer needs. It was a good project and I learned a lot. But it did fail. I concluded the talk by clarifying what I mean by failing by giving six conditions for project failure.

I managed to raise a good bunch of questions and comments, which was a nice starter for the evening.

Ari Tanninen gave a talk on a project which utilized solid agile practices and a team of skilled individuals and which managed to deliver an outstanding solution by any measure. But the project failed miserably. Why?

Ari's presentation was followed by intensive discussion on how a developer could prevent such a failure from happening. Cause to the failure was an organizational problem which could have been (and was) observed by 'techies'. But how to communicate this to management, that is, to business people? To people with a different personality type and communication style?

Three hours of thoughtful discussion on software development. I felt great afterwards.

http://confluence.agilefinland.com/display/af/Helsinki+Agile+Dinner+May