The Biodome, Agile Metrics, and a fly in my nose…
Freshly back from a week in the Gaylord Biodome for Agile 2014 in Orlando. It was an awesome week and we shot buckets of podcasts with Agile thought leaders and speakers from the conference. You can find them here:
In one of them, a fly, gnat, or some kinda nanobot drone flew directly up my nose.
People also came to my Personal Agility Canvas presentation which I am really psyched about. I got some great feedback. And apparently, I’ll be doing it again too.
The week was awesome. It was great getting to catch up with friends and learn from smart passionate people.
And, since it’s all about outcomes, if you are practicing Agile, or a PM working your way towards Agile, go find your accounting text books. In most of the interviews I shot, if the topic turned toward the program or portfolio, all the smart people have been trying to figure out ways to understand how to prioritize work. Most of them are borrowing tools from the financial/accounting world. A good place to start would be with the following ideas/tools (things I immediately forgot after grad school):
Net Present Value
Internal Rate of Return
Cost of Delay
Real Options
What is most interesting to me is that in the Agile space, which is populated by people who have largely turned away from the old way of planning and managing work, there is a recognition that new tools are needed if we are ever going to get past the point where having a clear understanding of how to quantify value is a bit like that imaginary girlfriend from Canada you met a summer camp.
In the same way that the current response to the question about enterprise seems to mean turning back to some traditional PM approaches from the past, we are now turning to financial analysis tools to attempt to understand and quantify what actually is important. It’s a complicated thing and it’s not done yet, but if you are working in Agile, time to get schooled up on the accounting bits.
Reading: Alpha by Greg Rucka
Listening: Marc Ribot: Live at the Village Vanguard
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