Agile is All About Value — why don’t we manage it that way?

I created a word cloud for the Agile manifesto values and not surprisingly the word Value is the most prominent word in the cloud, so why is it that after 20 years we have not developed any meaningful way to quantify value from which agile delivery can be improved? Our focus over the past 20 years has been on the creation of frameworks that provide an operational foundation for aspects of agile but do not deliver on it holistically. So much so that our organizational planning and delivery capabilities are still rooted in old annual planning and waterfall project management ways of working.

I also believe that value cannot be found just at the team level, rather value is an organizational concern and focus and is maximized by aligning strategically important objectives and goals to the work that the teams deliver to realize those goals and objectives. Presupposing that Product Owners and teams know best what is most valuable is one of the aspects of Agile that leaders don’t buy into and is the reason that they still leverage their non-agile ways of working.

My QValue scoring model provides an approach that makes transparent and quantifies the outcomes we seek through our development efforts. The model incorporates modern investment theory, outcome-based management, and planning and incorporates a risk component which provides a way for the organization to not only talk about value but also about the risk and associated cost to obtain that value. Good financial management requires that we have a fiduciary responsibility to assess both value and cost collectively. And yet in technology we primarily look at the cost of the project in relation to the cost of other projects.

Time and again I hear organizations say that they never say no to a project, which means the cost and length of the project are the only aspects that are considered or put differently they ask — When and How Much, not What, and is strategically important to warrant an investment.

For Agile to gain broader success it needs to move away from the focus of implementing operational frameworks and towards managing by value outcomes, I can tell you when you do the entire conversation about how to maximize wealth generation for your business changes.