Ensure Value – Not Just Efficiency – in Your Agile Process

Industry analysts highlight a concept called Agile Value Management (AVM), which advocates maximizing the value of agile methodologies by more tightly connecting Scrum with analytical measures of strategic business value.

The goal of AVM is constant alignment of the company’s efforts with the genuine needs of its customers. And Accept Software’s Accept Requirements solution (part of our Innovation Management Suite) offers unmatched capabilities to accomplish this goal, through:

• Discovering, evaluating, and prioritizing the issues that best assure market success;
• Maximizing the creation of value throughout the agile development process; and
• Providing clear measurements of the business value delivered after each sprint.

Connecting Strategy and Execution for Better Results

Traditionally, the focus of business strategy has been driving revenues via the creation of value for customers. Operational execution on the other hand – including agile software development – is primarily concerned with maximizing efficiency and minimizing waste. Yet as business cycles continue to accelerate, companies are discovering that barriers between strategy and execution must come down; that fast-paced agile development must be guided by sound strategic input that is similarly agile and responsive to changing factors that drive business value.

In particular, the product backlog that forms the cornerstone of agile iterations can often be enhanced to offer a true and up-to-the-minute picture of the user stories and tasks that will deliver maximum value for each release. At the same time, richer communication of the business issues behind the strategies and rankings can help empower the scrum, providing sharper insights and greater focus on the key facets of value.