Calculating Business Value

• The source most people think of when assessing business value is economic value. How many units can be sold? How much can be charged per unit? And how can costs be lowered? These are important fundamental questions that need to be answered before you determine whether or not a product is worth creating. However, market value is not the only thing to look at.

• Another important source of business value is the mitigation of risk. Before launching a new project, a Product Owner should develop a number of hypotheses about the market and then test them systematically. Activities that test these hypotheses generate value to the project and company. This is especially important if you are  in the business of innovating.

• Testing technical assumptions also creates business value. Does the organization really have all the knowledge and tools necessary to deliver the product? If not, is the project still lucrative enough to justify procuring the necessities to make it a reality?

And finally when assessing business value, the Product Owner should determine if completing a backlog item would expand the company’s capabilities. Will the staff develop new skills allowing them to expand the company’s product line? Will leaders improve internal processes that will make other parts of the company more effective? Will refactoring a section of code eliminate a large share of the bugs that consume valuable team energy and free them up for value creating development? All these are examples of business value creation through capability building.

The Product Owner needs to determine how much effort an Epic will take and whether the organization has the resources to complete the project. We prioritize the backlog by return on investment (ROI), which is the business value we get in exchange for the effort/money invested to accomplish it. In Scrum, we often use the story points of an Epic as the measure of investment. Coordination with the finance department can also help this process substantially as they probably already have a defined method for evaluating ROI.

Commonly used methods include (from fastest to most quantitative):

• Bubble Sort
• Planning Poker
• Break Even Analysis
• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Net Present Value (NPV)

Business value doesn’t have to be purely economic. Often a company is hoping to make an impact, or deliver on a social mission. The ability to accomplish these goals can also be defined as creating business value. Depending on what your company is hoping to accomplish one technique may be more helpful than another.