Value and Importance Are NOT the Same Thing

In large organizations with multiple competing priorities from business leaders that are focused on being and staying competitive, they make requests for their technology teams to deliver work (aka projects) for them and two things become evident — They often can’t quantify the value of their requests and they don’t understand their team’s capacity.

The outcome of these two issues is that teams are often over capacity (aka over-worked) and the estimates that teams provide are widely inaccurate.

What is happening is that we are confusing importance with value. Both are important but we should lead with value for most of the work that we plan to take on.

Value is how we drive growth in our business, leveraging innovation to design new products, develop efficient business capabilities, and deliver higher profits that feed the future growth needed of any business.

Importance becomes how we view risk. When a business faces regulatory, compliance, and security issues that must be developed, maintained, and reacted to, the value becomes implied in the risk the business faces if they choose not to do this work (fines, loss of brand reputation, to being forced to cease operations). Doing the work sustains the value we have already developed and mitigates the risk we could be facing.

When developing a Portfolio Intake process, you need to develop a multi-faceted process that involves:

1. Large Initiatives

2. Small enhancements and RTB

3. Legal, Compliance, and Regulatory work

In dealing with these three Intake avenues that work can flow to your teams, you need to understand and agree to:

1. Capacity of the teams — This is the currency you must spend across the three Intake avenues.

2. Balance — Each team will be different in the work that they do, some may have more small enhancements and RTB if they are supporting a mature product or capability, and others may have a different mix. You need to know how the capacity of a team will be consumed, leaving some excess slack for the inevitable work that comes in, often the more important.

The most important thing you need to do is to develop a value-scoring model. I’ve developed a model (Qvalue — Outcome Based Scoring Model) that has been successfully implemented at several organizations. QValue aligns the organizations’ strategies to value outcomes so that we can focus on value delivery over cost containment.

If you would like to learn more contact me at michael@soundagile.