Value is hard to get a grip on, even if everybody is talking about it, few have an idea what value means at their organizations. And if you are going to succeed with your projects, new business etc. You need to know what value you and your stakeholders are looking for.
Agile and lean is very much about creating and understanding your organizations value streams and where the money are created.
At Black Swan Farming they have created an pretty nice model to think about value. As the picture shown you can start to think value in this four different aspects.
- Are you increasing the revenue with what you are doing?
- Or maybe you are protecting your income that you have already?
As you can see the first two are focus on revenues, either new or existing revenue.
The other two is focus on cost and how you can either maintain or reduce the cost.
- Reduce cost with better products, organizational structure, cheaper maintenance etc.
- Avoid cost is where you are investing to keep the current cost. For an example, if you are putting in more feature to an product the maintenance cost could rise if you don´t do something about it.
Try to print out this picture and next time you planing to do an business case, start to think about the value in this terms instead of classic cost terms. This is extremely hard, even if you want to change the view on value, the existing organization structure will fight back. The process, methods and routines is created in a way already. And if we talk about the people in the organization, all the managers that are demanding documents with numbers that you know you can´t give them, then we have some serious challenges on our hands.
But remember to start small, don´t try to change the world instead begin to act in a way that´s are aligned with your personal beliefs.
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