How do you determine/define the business value of a backlog item?

[Claudia Dineen]

Looking for best practices on "quantifying" the business value of a story, if there are any. 

[Thomas Deiler]

Dear @Claudia Dineen,

without having more details about your requirement, I can just give you a generic hint on this:

Ideally every item of your backlog can deliver a business value to your companies product. To measure this you would need a direct channel of what a particular item bought in the past. I doubt that you can really measue this in € or $. But you could get a feeling for each item how much it has increased your total products business value.

Same as for estimating user stories in story points in a relative way, you can do this with the business value. The currency there should also be virtual.

Again - this is very generic - I don't know you business / market understanding or product knowledge.

So long

Thomas

[Claudia Dineen]

Thank you Thomas.  I've been doing some research in the meantime and have found much information.  As you suggest above, ESTIMATING the biz value in planning is the way to go - focusing on ensuring the estimates are relative (a "2" really is twice as valuable as a "1").

[Raimundas Juska]

Just an idea - you can use labels for that. E.g. create some custom scoring system and add labels e.g. Business Value 1 - BS1, BS2 and so on.

[Troy Spetz]

We keep a simple table which lists the features to be implemented in the next release. The features are ordered by Business Value, which is 1 to n.

Features are built, according to this Business Value prioritisation.

How you determine the '1 to n' business value ordering is art, science and a bit of magic ;-)