What are some approaches that others have used in defining Business Value in Jira v8.5.3?

[Stan G.]

Looking to understand what fields others use, perhaps labels, priority, etc.  Also looking to understand the how behind it, such as the general thought process or calculation.

Currently the team I am on uses a complex calculation of possible revenue minus resource cost and this is then determined if done monthly, quarterly or whatever the defined frequency is.  We then use an excel spreadsheet to maintain value at a story level tied to an Epic.  We determined this is not a feasible process and creates a lot of overhead on our team, particularly the Product Owner.  So, looking for advice here.

Thanks in advance.

[tokcum]

Dear Stan,

I'm familiar with very different approaches. For example I implemented a quite sophisticated Portfolio Management. In this case the criteria were sales revenue, customer tie and margin. Visualization was done by EasyBi.

Another quite common approach is to use impact and urgency and build an priority matrix based on these two. Impact could be how many users are affected and urgency addresses to which extent their productivity is affected. The priority could be automatically derived from these two according to a matrix. This automation could be implemented without any programming by Automation for Jira or in case you use Jira Service Desk this capability is built in.

Another approach I once implemented were some metrics e. g. expressing customer value to planned effort and comparison of planned to actual states. This can be easily done with numeric custom fields and the calculation of the metrics can be automated with Automation for Jira using smart values.

To conclude: there are lot of possibilities. From my personal experience it's important to really define what your metrics / KPIs are. Then think about the process and what data you need to calculate these metrics. Last step is implementation and visualization.

Hope this helps a little bit in getting started.

[Stan G.]

Thanks @tokcum , I like the priority matrix idea.  I need to figure out how that factors into Business Value, as you say I need think about the metrics/KPIs and then the process and data that goes into the calculation.

[Alan Parkinson]

Is this a product or system you are selling? What is the error rate on the possible revenue estimates? 

I've always found estimating revenue on functionality to be highly error-prone. What we have down is look at the underlying usage metrics of the product and understand what the financial impact on the business would be (cost or revenue) if that metric moved X amount. When you understand that you can switch your business value and planning to focus on moving the metrics in the direction the business wants.

Two common metrics used in SaaS are WAU (Weekly Active Users) and % of active users retained from the previous week. WAU can be improved in many ways, better product marketing, better onboarding etc... Other products and systems have different key metrics

[Stan G.]

@Alan Parkinson , this is work being done on a system to help our Engineering Business partners; I am on a DevSecOps team.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You've already got some far better answers on process than I was going to ramble through.  But I wanted to call out a couple of practical points:

Aim to keep it as simple as possible for the people who may be feeding information into your process.  Think about their roles and what you expect of them.  Don't ask a developer to have to understand a business case enough that they can start to put finance related figures in, and equally, don't ask your business people to feed in estimates of how long coding might take. 

Automate as much as possible, do not ask people to do calculations (especially by drawing data out into spreadsheets - they have a strong tendency to be wrong, unless they are no more complex than a simple list).  Get them to put in data that they understand and then use scripting or automation to calculate numbers for everyone, keeping them in Jira to minimise the errors that usually creep in when data is extracted.

[Stan G.]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , thanks, yes will be getting away from the spreadsheets as fast as possible.  Now I just need to figure out the process and automation pieces.