This book was recommended to me by Jamie Phillips. Given my role as an Agile subject matter expert at Lirio, reading this book is part of my self-guided professional development.
For a chapter-by-chapter summary and relevant quotations I highlighted while reading, check out my extended summary here.
“Business value isn’t something that is well understood by the business. … There is a legacy way of thinking that distinguishes between the business and the technologists. The business figures out what is valuable, puts it into a set of requirements, and tosses it over the wall to IT. IT then makes a commitment to cost and schedule and delivers. This made sense in a Waterfall world.”
Value means different things to different people, and to different types of companies (e.g., startup, non-profit, government).
Everyone is looking for the one true metric that defines value for work done within an org. Common metrics are net present value (NPV), return on investment (ROI), and market value added (MVA). Many of these neglect the Agile dimension of time.
Bureaucracy in its own right is not evil or wasteful. It arises because you need rules to work within systems. We’d do well to not let the processes calcify.
Value is everyone’s responsibility — not just the business, not just the product owner, not just the delivery teams, not just IT. Cross-functional teams (i.e., X-teams) with an experimental mindset and culture are most productive here.