Tie User Stories to Business Goals

Of the many choices you may have for managing agile efforts, only the Accept solution is designed on a market model framework. This provides a rich set of capabilities to generate product ideas and priorities from across your ecosystem – including crowdsourcing from customers and other stakeholders – and then to evaluate each idea against the company’s strategic objectives and financial goals.

Make Decisions Objectively and With Greater Certainty

Each user story gains intelligence as members of your product innovation team link and weight key drivers such as customer needs, competitive issues, and company strategy against it. The Accept framework captures and maintains granularity of information, which is vital for quantitatively evaluating the value of various requirements, and modeling tradeoffs throughout your process.

Scoring Prioritizes User Stories

Accept generates a master list of user stories, stack-ranked based on the Strategic Score calculated for each item. Each user story’s Strategic Score reflects the weighting of the item’s value compared to all other user stories, rated against the specific qualities that your organization deems most important. These qualities are the drivers of your business – customer requests, competitive factors, geographic factors, strategic priorities, and more – and can be completely tailored to the market realities your organization faces. Because your data is requirement-based, the Strategic Score reflects emerging market conditions as they happen; for example, a new product release by a major competitor can trigger a particular user story to leap in importance.

Use Graphical Charts to Visualize Sprint Value

The 2x2 alignment reports form another key assessment of the relative value of your user stories under consideration. This graphic view compares the strategic value of your user stories in light of the resources required to execute each one. For example, two requirements might have similar strategic value rankings, but one may have far fewer story points assigned to it, increasing its relative value.

These analytics are vitally important as you plan your releases, sprints, and sprint backlogs