RE: Re: Responsibility

Glen,

> > "Traditional" covers a lot of ground. In past projects (70s) I 
> budgeted
> > cost and scheduled work completion by month. I reported actual 
> expenditure
> > versus budget, actual work complete against plan and the ratio of 
> the
> > two - I believe we made up a name for the ratio, but I can't recall 
> it.
> > 
> > Of course, none of this measured anything except our adherance to 
> plan.
> > We could be right on schedule and still have the whole thing turn 
> out
> > to be a waste of time. :-)
> 
> Yea, sorry. The best way I know is classify "traditional" is where 
> the Plan and compared with the "Actual Cost," and there is no measure 
> of the delivered value. In the EVMS world this is called Level of 
> Effort. As time passes, money is consumed, and it is assumed value is 
> accuring.

Well, frankly the management didn't seem to understand what my ration
meant anyway. I like your phrase "it is assumed value is occuring" 
That's really the heart of my question about this.

I guess doing the simplest thing applies here. In most projects, that
assumption is probably right. In some of the government projects I
was involved in, it was a big leap from getting the project done
to actually seeing the desired societal benefit. We were supposed to
use "systems analysis" techniques - obviously not the same as what IT
calls systems analysis - to assign values to such things. It was
a bit of a crapshoot.

I suppose it's reasonable in a more typical IT project to assume
that the cost that management was willing to budget _is_ the value
of the work. Although it does introduce some budgeting bias.

> > Has anyone tried to match the XP notion of value to EVMS? What I 
> mean
> > by this is if we have completed some set of stories at some cost, do
> > you differentiate the result from some other set of stories at the
> > same cost, but having less [xp] value? Or less value in the real
> > world? [costs avoided, lives saved, etc.]
> 
> This is the emerging discussion. I found several authors that are 
> using all the right terms, and unfortunatly have all the ideas we 
> have in a upcoming paper, darn...
> 
> Check out the papers at the bottom of the Niwot Ridge EV page, the 
> ones by Paul Solomon. He discuss all the aspects of SW EV management, 
> all that is left is to connect the dots...OK that'll be our job.

Added to my list.
 
> > This seems as if it would be pretty hard to do - and maybe not worth
> > the effort. Or maybe outside the scope of IT - except that I seem
> > to remember who got blamed when well-done projects didn't actually
> > produce the hoped-for end results.
> 
> Oh juts the oppisite. The "testable requirments" papers ARE XP 
> process in EV cloths. Everything is there to move XP dircetly into EV 
> domains (OK minus all the Zen Master stuff, since we're really boring 
> an unemotional here). But, most of the "stories, UT, velocity, FT" 
> stuff is a very nice fit for EV software projects. Over this weekend 
> I've come to the realization that we're very close. My job this week 
> of to try to put all this together and try it on on my staff - 
> they're great critics.

I'd like to hear about this. I'm still not clear if you're talking
about EVMS value mapping to XP gummi bears or to value points though.
I can understand how to do the former, but not the latter.
 
Charlie Poole
[email protected]
www.pooleconsulting.com
www.charliepoole.org




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