Certainty and uncertainty in value and duration
John Cutler tweeted about how he approaches forecasting with a team, and shared a Google Doc explaining the method.
One the second page was this:
This is important. It made me realise that initiatives can / should be considered / assesses / prioritised / forecasted on how certain or uncertain the value they will deliver is, and how certain or uncertain the duration is. Initiatives of unknown duration and unknown value are high risk compared to those of known value and known duration.
So, we need to have a reliable method for forecasting cycle time (not estimating effort time) to arrive at a known duration, and for establishing value (including cost of delay) as a known quantity.
Making these method of prioritisation explicit, reliable and robust is vital for across the organisation (not just within the digital department or within the scrum team) in order to be part of the mind shift towards delivering value continuously.