Introduction

“We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay.” - Donald G. Reinertsen (Author)

Decisions to make

• Determine what “value” represents in the program
• Decide how leadership will measure the value delivered by the program (volume of work produced or the impact made on the internal/external customer)
• Define what criteria needs to be satisfied to consider a feature done

Context

• Sometimes a team does not have a technique to prioritize work effectively, and instead uses ineffective techniques like HiPPo (Highest Paid PersOn)
• Sometimes a team only focuses on the predictability of their delivery “say-do ratio” and not on the actual value the work is providing for the organization and its customers
• Sometimes a team only focuses on the features and stories in the backlog and not a larger objective they want to accomplish through the work
• Sometimes a team does not establish quantitative measures to determine if they have accomplished an objective, instead focusing more on qualitative methods
• Sometimes a team does not connect the work they do to the products they support, leading to a mis-match in where they focus and the work they do
• Sometimes a team doesn’t have a clear way to communicate the value they deliver when they do release software to production

Why we care

• Programs and teams will deliver software (that’s what they do), but we want to ensure the work they do is valuable to the organization and its customers
• Being able to understand the “why” behind the work we are doing (the value it’s delivering) will give our teams insight into what we are trying to accomplish and ultimately lead to a better outcome
• We need to focus not just on our “say-do ratio” (ability to deliver what we say we will), but also whether the work completed is valuable to our users (both internal and external)
• Understanding how to incorporate value into work prioritization enables alignment throughout the entire program (and organization)
• Understanding how value is delivered and what the value is associated with (e.g. products, business capabilities) aids in a program's ability to understand when and where value will be created

The Atlassian view

• Evolving simple prioritization to more advanced prioritization techniques like Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) in Jira Align allows a program to review and prioritize work from multiple perspectives, include business value, time criticality, and risk reduction/opportunity enablement
• Defining objectives and then creating new features or linking existing features from the backlog to each objective helps ensure the work being done is directly linked to what value represents for the organization
• Establishing key results for each objective allows the program leadership team to provide both qualitative and quantitative measures that they believe will indicate when an objective has been achieved
• Creating release vehicles/fixed versions allows for the aggregation of completed work into meaningful groupings that can be communicated internally and externally to describe the value delivered