Determining an Agile Project’s Business Value


Posted in: Agile Transformation

Being new to agile, IT and business leadership were unable to interpret project performance issues and needed early indication of performance failures, risks and capacity issues. Project teams were not delivering value. Projects were over budget and product backlog items were not completed on time.

Major initiatives were in constant flux and project rescue mode
Velocity and burn down charts were not diagnosing the root case for lack of project failure. Leadership wanted a set of KPI’s that could predict and diagnose the root cause of project performance (past, present and future) .

Agile Earned Value Management

Agile EVM is more informative because it allows you to tie in Scrum’s abstract valuations of size and complexity (user stories and story points) with more realistic metrics of time and cost.

Agile EVM provides the data of scope, time and cost which allows you to:

  • Compare monetary expressions of value planned, earned and consumed at any given moment
  • Calculate cost and schedule efficiency
  • Make forecasts for the end-of-the-project time and cost

What Success looks like:

  • Leadership has a clear set of KPIs for project and team performance
  • Abstract concepts like velocity and burn down now have valuation metrics that can measure actual vs planned budget spend and schedule health
  • Business partners & leadership can clearly understand the value of agile teams

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