Prioritization by Business Value

Prioritization in Agile is considered from the customer’s perspective with help of MoSCoW. This is not enough for the commercial company. You need to survive, to pay bills, to pay the next sprints. You have to think about features from the perspective of the company as well.

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Business perspective

This prioritization is however tricky. Many teams fail at it. For most companies, this is the most abstract part of the agile coaching sessions we do for our clients. The reason is very simple. Many companies struggle with an understanding of the business model of the company. Most of them even do not have such a business model for the products defined. That leads to a big failure. Earlier or later product will not be successful hence it is going to die. Not worth to invest nor 1 Euro.

The reason is very simple. Many companies struggle with an understanding of the business model of the company. Most of them even do not have such a business model for the products defined. That leads to a big failure. Earlier or later product will not be successful hence it is going to die.

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The final order of the requirement is an outcome of a thoughtful thinking process starting far away from feelings. First, we need to describe the business model.

The most common is a traditional business model documents with vision, strategy, business forecasts, cost structure, etc. You can find dozens of such templates on the Internet. For us, they are not worth it for an agile environment as you will need to react to a lot of changes and they are quite huge. Resistant to changes, hard and slow to evaluate.

Business Model Canvas

Business model canvas, however, puts all necessary information on one page. Business is described from many perspectives which should be easy to validate on any day of the product delivery. Some parts of it do even describe customers in more detail (see Value Proposition Canvas) which can be then used in product backlog management to describe personas used in user stories.

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Lean Canvas

The lean canvas is a simpler version of the Business Model Canvas while still, it provides all necessary information. It better fits for small products where you do not need to describe for example partners.

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How to manage business value in ScrumDesk

Based on your business model you will be able to specify the business value provided by features (user stories). As it is typical in Scrum, the business value is often a relative comparison of the values of different requirements. In ScrumDesk we offer a planning poker scale for business value parameters.

Business value can be entered in the side view available once you click some user story card. Except for the planning poker values, it is possible to enter other values as numbers as well.  Some of our clients prefer to evidence the real business value as feature’s revenue.

So0me other customers prefer to use just T-Shirt sizes (XL, L, M, S, XS).

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This value can be used later for filtering, sorting, and ordering of requirements in STORY MAP, BACKLOG, PLAN, or WORK view.

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How to mix MoSCoW and business value?

In the previous article, we mentioned that you should start to prioritize requirements from the perspective of the customer. We ended up with the list of cards in the order of values Must, followed by Should, and then Could.

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Now, having business value as well, we can update the order with business value as well.

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MoSCoW values created segments that were ordered then by business value.

Evaluate delivery of the business value

Once features are done, the business value is added to the product. That is tracked in the Business value chart on the Reports page.

ScrumDesk business value chart reports agile scrum product owner

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