Agile’s Uncomfortable Relationship with Value

Agile speaks often of delivering value to our customers, it’s a common refrain you will hear from Agile coaches.

Coaches make broad statements regarding delivering value, which can make you feel as if you are a lesser person for not understanding what they mean when in reality they haven’t the foggiest notion of what they are talking about.

Value can be an elusive concept, it’s subjective in many cases and Agile’s relationship with value is mainly meaningless because we haven’t provided people a way to quantify what is valuable and what isn’t.

Blindly telling leadership or an Agile team that their primary responsibility is to deliver value to their customer without providing them a way to identify or quantify value is both frustrating and unproductive.

Generally speaking, organizations strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors, this is what drives entrepreneurship, that new idea that takes a product or service in a new direction or level.

But let us not confuse creativity for value, some of the most creative products may not meet the need of a customer at a given moment in time, meaning they didn’t deliver real value to the organization funding the product development. Though through failures we can derive new information that drives future product development and value, that is a topic for another article.

So you can see value is elusive, made even harder in a fast-paced Agile delivery environment where we are seeking to deliver new features every few weeks.

So when an Agile coach espouses value as a primary goal for you to aspire to, ask them to define what they mean by value and listen to the silence because they won’t have any idea, but boy it sounds good, right?

So where do we go to start quantifying value in a meaningful way?

Look first to your Strategies and then to Outcomes and Key Results (OKR’s) to have a framework to begin to create a value scoring engine that will help you understand what drives value in your organization and how to use it to foster important investment conversations.

Connecting Value and Strategy is important as it aligns us to the broad goals and outcomes the organization seeks, they are our north star. However many strategies are just a bit too broad to tie specific things to them, this is where we start the process of creating value factors that quantify value for us while being aligned to our strategic direction.

Value factors provide a framework to align the outcomes we seek to deliver (commit to) with strategies.

For example, if one of our strategies is delivering world-class customer service then we might have a valuation factor that describes how we might do that, such as Improving Customer Satisfaction Scores, delivering enhanced experiences, or improving efficiency.

We can also bring in architectural aspects such as making systems scalable or highly performant as these are also things that can also improve customer satisfaction scores.

As we create the value factors we will also want to assign a weight to them so that we generate a weighted average score. Weighting provides leadership with a way to shift focus in priorities, without changing their strategically aligned factors.

Just remember none of the Agile frameworks that we use to operationalize Agile provide any guidance on what Value is.