Pols Consulting

Luke Hohmann is in London and has agreed to come along to XTC on the 17th November to describe and play some of his Innovation Games.

I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. I’ve found using Innovation Games really helps with situations like this. Luke has lots of practical ideas for Agile Teams.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 17th Nov at  Zuhlke Engineering‘s offices  (43 Whitfield Street, London W1T 4HD).

It’s free, but please signup on the XTC website so we get an idea of numbers.

Many thanks to Luke for doing this and Keith Braithwaite for kindly offerring the use of the Zulke offices to run this session (knowing Luke, there will be lots of noisy audience participation so our usual pub venue wouldn’t work too well).

We were so lucky to get Dave Snowden as an XPDay keynote back in 2004.  One of the memorable moments was when he used the metaphor of organising a childrens party to explain the various approches to managing complexity.  It certainly resonated with the audience (based on the conversation in pub afterwards – a wonderful XP day tradition!).

Dave’s now uploaded a version to YouTube… Fantastic stuff. I love the deadpan humour.

I remember having a rant at the eXtreme Tuesday Club a few years ago, “Who cares about working software, if it’s not what the business need? Delivering Business Value is the most important thing!”

This was triggered from seeing too many agile teams get bogged down in the minutiae of the process.  They did not think about how the business would benefit from what they did or how they could deliver value early.  Delivering working software was the only important measure they cared about.  They missed the subtlety of the Agile Manifesto that talked about delivering valuable software:

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

I saw several agile projects that delivered software the business did not want.  Chris Matts and I made it our mission to bang on about Business Value back at the Agile Development Conference in 2003.  We published a paper in Cutter in 2004 based on our experience of applying these ideas on our projects.

It’s great that this is starting to get traction in the agile community.  There was even a whole track dedicated to this very subject at Agile 2008.  This has to be a good thing.

On reflection, I think the moniker Business Value was a mistake as it confuses the conversation.  People start assigning a Value to what they do:

• This project will attract 120 new registrations per month This statement is expressed as an absolute rather than a model. The greatest problem with this statement is that it’s impossible to re-evaluate the business value if market conditions change. There is no mention of the cost of generating this revenue or the amount of capital investment required to generate the revenue.
• This project is worth $12M
• This project with generate 4 million page hits in the first year.

Several speakers at Agile 2008 talked about business value Story Points. Joe Little proposed assigning Business Value points to each item in a backlog.  My experience is that this consumes a vast amount of energy and the business people start making up large values to game the prioritization process (Luke Hohmann has a nice posting on why prioritizing the backlog by ROI like this does not work).

I really enjoy watching the BBC television series Dragon’s Den.  Entrepreneurs pitch for investment in the Den from five Angel Investors (The Dragons!), willing to invest their own money in exchange for equity.  When the Entrepreneurs provide a Value, the dragons always probe for the model:  ”How much does it cost to manufacture?”,  ”What’s the size of the market?”, “What form of distribution channel are you using?”, “So how did you come to value your business at $8 Million?”, etc.  It’s impossible for the Dragons to make a sensible investment decision from a simple value.

This is why chris and I always say Business Value is a Model, not a number.

Software development is also an investment and, just like the Dragons (although I’m not suggesting our customers are dragons!), the Business need to probe the model to assess the value of the software investment.

Another problem is the model is is a state of flux.  Few businesses exist in a vacuum.  Markets change, assumptions become invalidated and competitors launch disruptive technology.  If you assign a value to a story based on a model, there is a danger that the model’s assumptions have changed by the time you want to implement it.  People take the business value number for granted and rarely question its validity.  I prefer a less formal approach, and simply use the model as a litmus test to verify if the next chunk of work makes sense as and when you need it.

Creating solutions that deliver the maximum business value should be the primary purpose of what every development team does, regardless of their process.  It’s more then just consuming stories or taking for granted that the items in the product backlog make sense.

This post is a bit of a therapeutic release valve. Last night I tried to book some airline tickets.  It took nearly 3 hours; although it felt much longer. How hard should it be?

I started out trying www.kayak.co.uk. It has a refreshingly intuitive user-interface and it searches lots of web sites for the best prices.  Just what I was looking for.

I particularly liked the nifty flight filters you can use to explore how the time of the flight, or the choice of airport impact the price.  Although I did find myself having to scan around the search results page (see above) to hunt down the date of the flights (I didn’t expect to find it in the heading. I guess the annoying advert in between the heading and the search results did not help).

The killer problem with Kayak is that it’s only a travel search engine (a friend described it as all fur coat and no knickers!) You can’t book the flights on Kayak and they have no control over the quality of the data. It turned out that I couldn’t book any of the flights returned in the search results!

They all pointed to a dreadful site called cheaptickets.com (the name should have triggered some alarm bells!).

When I first clicked the link from Kayak to Cheaptickets.com it spent ages displaying the following:

before it finally gave up and said (at least it said sorry!):

I tried clicking the link again (glutton for punishment).  This time the error message read:

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

It presented a list of alternatives that I could select.  At least it’s been helpful!

So I, rather naively, selected one of newly presented alternative options, and waited, … and waited, … and waited some more before it responded with (yes, you guessed it):

We’re sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available.

Not one of the recommend suggestions actually worked! What kind of web site gives you a collection of impossible to select products?

Aaaahhhhhh.

Next I tried Lufthansa.com – the cheapest option was £1600 per passenger, just to travel within Europe.

I then moved onto Lastminute.com.  I entered the dates and airports all over again and just when everything was looking good, I got this:

Aaaahhhhhh.  I was starting to think “Sod it – I don’t need a vacation!!”

In final desperation I went to expedia.co.uk.  I tend to stay well clear of expedia for multiple destination flights due to the high chance of sustaining a repetitive strain injury from the amount of mouse clicking required to complete the simple task.

I entered the data and it presented me with the various options for the first flight.  The idea (if you’re feeling charitable) is that you select the first flight, it presents the options for the second flight.  You select the second flight and it presents the options for the third flight.  At this point it tells you that this combination of flights will cost several thousand pound. You gasp, mutter something under your breath, and start all over again; randomly clicking flights and hoping for the best.  With any luck you will be able to remember which ones you have already clicked on.

There is another option. You can choose “view complete trips” and Expedia will display selected combinations of flights that are ordered by price.  I clicked this.  Some of the options were very close to what we wanted – except that one of the flights left at 6am.  So I adjusted the time of this flight to see what would happen to the price and all the other flights changed too.  Aaaahhhhhh.

Eventually, clicking like a madman, I manged to find a comination of flights at the time we wanted that we could afford.  I thought the internet was supposed to champion the consumer?  All I got was a shonky and painful user experience.  Something I don’t want to repeat in a hurry.

That’s better.  It’s all out of my system now.  Deep breaths… Think nice calm thoughts…

One of my clients was telling me about the problems that they are having with “Aspirational Planning“.  I thought this was an excellent description of the problems lots of organisations have with planning.

Then it slowly dawned on me that he was serious – they really do create “Aspirational Plans”.  They are fully aware that they don’t reflect reality (as they take so long to prepare), but the senior management love to spend lots of time and (other people’s energy) creating detailed plans of what may or may not happen one day.

The teams on the ground just roll their eyes when I ask about these plans. I’m going to have my work cut out on this one.

Here are some tips I picked up this week from a friend. He has just started at a new company. His new company has lots of projects without any clear indication of their business value. So he got them to draw a matrix like this (an evil 2×2 consultancy as it’s known in the trade):

He then asked everyone to place their project in the appropriate box!

This really helped people think about the business value. Just trying to justify the position in the box, makes you think about the value of the project. We’re not just doing projects for doing them sake (hopefully).

It was surprising how many high-risk, low value projects appeared on the grid! You can now ask “Why are we doing these?”, followed by, “Shouldn’t we be investing our energy elsewhere?”

The best bit of advice came at the end. I asked him, “But won’t they simply do the chart to humour you, and then return to their old ways?”

“Don’t be silly, I’ll just keep giving people more work until they stop working on non-important stuff!”

Still, I thought it was an interesting technique that was worth sharing.

Chris Matts and I are working on an article that looks at why IT management have a tendency to play to loose and not play to win. They tend to measure the wrong things and see IT as a cost and not a revenue generating opportunity.

The more I think about this, the more examples I see.

A friend just told me about a Bank who has told its IT contractors they must take 3 weeks (unpaid) holiday over Christmas. Apparently, this will save them £3 million pounds! This is staggering. Surely the revenue generated by these Contractors exceeds their cost?

Do you have any interesting example you would like to share? Please send me an email (andy@pols.co.uk).

ComputerWeekly.com have an interesting article (European banking giant adopts agile development methodology)

It’s full of mixed messages!

On the one hand it talks about Fred Tingey positive experience of using Extreme Programming (XP) at BNP Paribas.

And then, it switches tack with an apparent “Security Expert” taking the view that agile is far too risky:

…this type of development exposes users to unnecessary risks as it is difficult to build security into the software development lifecycle.

This is a strange thing to say as security is a feature (not a lifcycle issue) and delivering features is what XP is really good at. I have never had any problems adding security to an application that has been developed in an Agile way.

The wonderfully ironic twist is that Fred Tingey won the Risk Manager Of The Year award for using Agile (sadly not mentioned in the article)!

Oh well. The key part is that Fred Tingey is is winning awards for using Agile and that the banking community is starting to recognize the benefit of agile techniques. Well done Fred.

Chris Matts and I have just had our paper, The Five Business Value Commandments, published in the latest Cutter ~ Agile Software Development Advisory Service (available free if you register).

In this Executive Update, we introduce our top five guidelines for helping projects deliver business value. These guidelines allow the project manager to focus on delivering business value when he or she is under pressure to deliver intermediate work products or software. In addition, they show where effort should be expended on a project to derive the most benefit.

Chris Matts (the other half of the Agile Business Coach has just published a new paper on the joys of negative feedback: Encouraging the “Right Stuff” (PDF format)