Format: Workshop
Duration: 120 minutes. Can be done in 90 minutes if it saves the conference, but 120 minutes will deliver better experience.

Abstract for the conference program

The Business Value Game. How do you prioritize your features and stories?
Agile teams want to deliver maximum business value. That's easy if the
Onsite Customer assigns business value to each story. But how does the
Customer do that? How can you estimate business value?

This workshop is run as a game, where teams have to make tough
business decisions for their "organizations". Teams have to decide
which orders to take and what to deliver first in order to earn more.
The session gives the participants basic business value estimation
techniques, but the main point is to make people live through the
business situation and to help them feel the consequences of various
choices.

The length of the workshop and planned number of participants.
2 hours or 2.5 hrs with a coffee break in the middle. We can handle
any number of participants from 8 to 100. Ideal number would be 20-40

The intended audience and expected benefits of attendance.

Participants to planning games, especially product owners and onsite
customers; business people; customers; those who teach or coach the
preceding roles

Participants will learn how to assign business value to projects and
stories, prioritize and make plans that bring value. They will also
learn the ways for teaching this.

A description of the workshop content and how it will be conducted.

Agile teams want to deliver maximum business value. That's easy if the
Onsite Customer assigns business value to each story. But how does the
Customer do that? How can you estimate business value?

How do you decide between stories? How do you decide between projects?
How do you decide between clients?

This session gives you some simple business value estimation
techniques that are "good enough" for everyday use.

The session is run as a game, where teams of 'businesspeople' have to
make plans for their development team. The goal of the game is to earn
as much money as possible by delivering features and stories with the
highest possible business value, like in the XP Game. This game is a
complement to the XP Game: how do these 'business value points" on the
XP Game story cards get chosen?

Each businessperson in the team represents one (or more) clients who
will buy the team's product IF their feature(s) is in the product. The
team is going to have to make some tough decisions; the team is going
to have to disappoint some clients, because the development team has a
finite capacity.

We provide the clients and their wishes. We suggest the techniques to
estimate business value. The rest is up to you.

More detailed description & timetable

Length | Total | Contents
5 | 5 | Teams and materials
15 | 20 | Rules and iter 1
15 | 35 | Iter 2
10 | 45 | Debrief 1-2
25 | 70 | Iter 3-4
10 | 80 | Debr 3-4
20 | 100 | Iter 5-6
15 | 115 | Final debr and conclusions
5 | 120 | Buffer

The game originally designed by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van
Cauwenberghe was first tried on Agile 2008, then run on XP days
Benelux. Pascal ran it on Scan-Agile 2008 with a huge success. Artem
ran the workshop on Tampere Agile Dinner with extremely good feedback
(average value for anonymously collected "I would recommend the
session to my friends" was over 9 out of 10) and on XP2009 with huge
success and several participants expressed the intent to run the game
in own companies.

Bios

Artem Marchenko
Currently a Product Manager in Nokia Artem Marchenko has over a decade
of software development under the belt. Artem was working for a number
of Ukrainian and Finnish companies, experienced various methodologies,
processes and leadership styles. He got acquainted with Agile in 2005,
liked the ideas and immediately started applying them in his projects
within Nokia.

Artem's main interests are Scrum and the ways of establishing
productive communication between the customer and development sides.
Artem pursues both practice and theory. He was a practicing Scrum
Master, now as a Product Manager he is playing a Product Owner role
for a vastly distributed team. He is doing his PhD studies on Agile
Project Management and consults and coaches various organizations on
the topics of effective software development.

Artem also maintains and regularly writes to thehttp://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com web site.

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is a consultant based in Brussels who tries to
solve more problems than he creates. To do this, he uses Agile, Lean,
Theory of Constraints and Systems Thinking techniques.

He's one of the founders of the Belgian XP group and one of the
organizers of XP Days Benelux. One day he and Vera Peeters invented
the "XP Game", because they couldn't explain XP to their team and
customers. They've learned that games are an ideal way to learn. Since
then he tries to transform work into play...

Vasco Duarte
Currently an Agile Coach in Nokia, Vasco Duarte is an experienced
product and project manager, having worked in the software industry
since 1997. Vasco has also been an Agile practicioner since 2004, he
is one of the leaders and a catalyst in the adoption of Agile methods
and an Agile culture at Nokia and previously at F-Secure.
Vasco's humble contributions to the improvement of the software
development profession can be read in his blog:http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.blogspot.com.
Both organizers have been to a number of Agile-related seminars and
conferences and ran activities on those.

Additional material

Business_Value_Game_for_Scan_Agile_09.pdf