What is the Unit of Measure of Your Benefit?
December 7, 2009 @ Herding Cats from Glen B. Alleman
Tom Gilb has a wonderful post about defining "business value." When anyone makes a statement about a beneficial outcome, my first question is "what are the units of measure?"
I have some favorites:
- Our tool saves you time - how much time? Can this time actually be returned to the business in terms of bookable hours that I can see in the time keeping system?
- Our process significantly increases the quality of your product - can I see the before and after measures of quantitative quality measures?
- Scrum is a risk reduction method - how much risk is reduced? Is this risk reduction reflected in saved cost and time for risk mitigation or risk retirement
- Our Enterprise 2.0 solution is "easy to use" - what are the units of measure of easy?
- Our solution integrates into your workflows - really "my" workflows? Say my ABAP SAP workflows, how about my WfMC compliant workflows? Oh not those kind of workflows. What kind of workflows?
In other words, how will I recognize what you are telling me in the absence of your physical hand waving? How will I physical confirm what you've told me is the benefit?
The absolute best unit of measure of IT projects is a monetary currency. I put money I, I get money out. All other "units of measure" cannot be exchanged at the back.
If the speaker has no tangible evidence of the beneficial outcomes in units of measure meaningful to the buyer, firmly but kindly show him the door.
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