Value

We talk about value a lot in agile. The whole point of agile is often given as "the ability to deliver value quickly". Lean looks at value streams and flows of value. But when we say value, what do we really mean? What is value? The dictionary tells us that value is "the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something."

So value describes something that is important to someone. But who? When we ask ourselves this question, we usually come up with and answer of - "the customer". This isn't a wrong answer, customer value has to be our of our key drivers. Make the customer happy by giving them what they want. That's the key to business success. But note that I said "one of our key drivers", not "our key driver". There are other "someones" out there who are also important, and often get forgotten. What about the organisation itself? Its employees?

AgilityDave Martin28 June 2017valueComment

Agile Speeds Delivery Of Value Not Code

In the agile community we love fast. Fast feedback, fast delivery. Fast is good. Slow is bad. Why then is the most common complaint I get about agile - "All this team stuff distracts me from writing code. We can't deliver fast if I can't write code". That's a good point. We are taking our devs away from coding to some extent. In an agile team they can’t just sit down in a corner with their headphones on and just cut code solidly for a week. There's a lot of team interaction that has to go on to make the team run smoothly.

So are we, by doing agile, slowing down delivery of code? Quite possibly yes. But what about fast delivery? How can we say we are about delivering fast but slow down the people who are actually delivering the code? The thing is, we don't actually deliver code. If we just delivered code we would go out of business. What we deliver is working, tested, fit for purpose code. More fundamentally than that, what we deliver is business value, not code. Agile is all about speeding the delivery of value, not the delivery of code.