Benefit Points: The Best Part of the Story

Delivering valuable software to your customer is the first priority in agile management and development. The product owner is involved along the way, and backlogs are prioritized, with the best of intentions to maximize business value early and eliminate waste. Yet in many IT development projects, bewilderment remains as to how to express business value in process decisions and the delivered system. Also, projects continue to implement functionality that's off the mark or never used. This situation occurs because there isn't sufficient methodological support to determine and monitor business value or to link business value decisions to the development project's mechanics. However, researchers have developed a bundle of easy-to-use core practices that help systematize a project's evolving knowledge. Although these practices are simple, they provide powerful support for monitoring project progress on both the realized business value and the realized costs.