RE: Re: Responsibility

Ron,

> Here's a question: consider a project that assigns a dollar value 
> to each story,
> and another project that only knows, for any pair of stories, 
> which one is worth
> more.
> 
> What differences could we detect in the decisions made in these 
> two projects?

Lovely question.

In the planning exercise that you do - although you weren't
there when I did it with Chet and Anne - we discovered that
knowing the actual value function would allow optimizing the
order of doing stories so that the most value was delivered
first. The actual measure to optimize was the ratio of the
value points to the level of effort points.

However, the results that we came up with using only rankings
were within a few points of the optimum and about twice - if
my memory serves - the value we created without any information
given in advance.

So having perfect knowledge of the "real" value of each story
should give us a slight improvement over having only rankings.

The problem with this is that perfect knowledge of value is
really not reachable - nor is perfect estimation of effort which
also plays in the optimization formula. I'd guess that normal
variations in both estimates would pretty quickly wipe out
any theoretical advantage. Combining that with the cost of
coming up with estimates of value, I pick simple ranking as
the winner.

This doesn't say anything against the usefulness of Cost/Benefit
calculations done in advance of approving the whole project.
In that case, we are looking at the expected value of the whole,
which is probably something more than the sum of the parts, and
the central limit theorem is standing by to help us out.

Charlie Poole
[email protected]
www.pooleconsulting.com
www.charliepoole.org




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