Value or Velocity?
Mon, 2008-12-22 05:59 — Brandon Carlson 
Subscribe to an RSS feed of reviews of this proposal 
Download session PDF
Add to calendar
Level: Practicing
One of the most common questions asked of practicing Agile teams is:
How can we increase velocity?
Many teams have had to answer this question, but is it the right question? Velocity is an excellent measurement for determining project timelines and progress towards them but doesn’t give us any indication about the overall value of the features being delivered. All too often poor prioritization and solutioning are ignored because velocity is the KPI for the team. This session shows how to use value as a tool to ensure that you get more of the right things done.
Process/Mechanics
This will simply be a PowerPoint presentation + discussion
- Overview of velocity and pitfalls associated with excessive focus on it. - 15 Min.
- Development focused, not value focused
- Too fine grained
- Great for project planning
- Define value - 15 Min.
- Impact across the organization
- From a customer POV, (not story level)
- A lightweight system for determining value - 30 Min.
- Identifying attributes
- Scoring attributes
- Optionally weighting attributes
- Customer POV (not story level)
- Measuring value - 15 Min.
- In production
- Finished goods
- Work in process
- Inventory
- Discussion - 15 Min.
Learning outcomes
- Value is defined by customer
- Value brings in revenue, not velocity
- Optimizing on velocity is a local-optimizaiton
- Velocity is useful when applied to the right problem
Featured participants
Primary target persona