Generating business value has as much to do with what the team delivers as what it does not do in the process. Any time that the team works on low business-value activities (including extensive status reporting) is time that could have been better spent delivering actual value to the organization. Miscommunication, extensive delays in management approvals and a lack of quality control processes can create an atmosphere of misaligned deliverables and rework – which results in wasted resource time and costs for the organization. Equally wasteful, is having the team do more work than is required to satisfy an objective (commonly known as over-production or over-delivery).
There are a number of proven Agile approaches that focus on the concept of waste management by eliminating any activities which add little or no value to the business. Agile approaches are specifically structured to minimize waste by:
- Providing teams with only enough time and resources to achieve the identified highest business-value outcomes
- Identifying risk areas and delivery issues as early as possible in the process to avoid pursuing a goal which may be unachievable within the stated budget
- Providing checkpoints throughout the process where business owners can review, refine and even stop (or postpone) the work undertaken by the team if it is no longer producing the highest business-value outcomes.
The productivity resources section provides links to more detailed information on business-value driven work and other Agile approaches for increasing your organization’s productivity levels.
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