Time ago I wrote about Product Owner, Development Team and Business Value where I talked about what is Business Value, but, there is a lot of interpretation about that, and because there is a lot of interpretation the perception of value creation can change depending on whom you ask.
One day I was looking for interesting articles and I ended up in this one Stop Time Tracking, Start Value Tracking of Jurgen Appelo and I had a lightbulb moment!
In Agile you will hear about delivering value early, but do you know if what you are doing is valuable? I think that the first step is to get that perception of value creation right?
So here is the software I developed that aims of this collection of value creation perception.
I called Value Preceptor
How does it work?
What is a topic?
It can be anything, a random meeting, sprint, retrospective, quick meeting, team dynamics, strategy workshop, etc. It can be anything that somehow can provide value to you as an individual, to your team, and to the organization.
When you create a topic there are some fields you need to fulfill.
Topic Name: The topic name…
Email Address: The e-mail you want to use that will be related to the topic, basically your e-mail.
Customized Mission statement: In the main form there is one question about if it was valuable for the organization, a mission statement is attached there, you can set your own if you want, by default you can set a mission statement and if this input is not fulfilled the default mission will be shown
Personal Code: Is not really a password, just a code you will use to check all the feedback provided.
This is how looks after you create the topic, a new field is created dynamically at the end, this is the URL you should share with all the people who participated in the Strategy Workshop
This the main form, every participant will see this page if they hit the URL you shared, the concept of the colored square is what I took from Jurgen Appelo.
The participant now has to provide some feedback.
Was something valuable for you: This question is for you, for you as an individual, I’m interested in knowing the perception of value created for you as an individual.
Was something valuable for the team: This question is for you as well, but I’m asking if you think that what we did was valuable for the team(the group of people that participated)
Was something valuable for the company: This question is for you as well, but I’m asking if you think that what we did was valuable for the organization, the company you work with.
For the first 2 questions these are the available answers(also from Jurgen Appelo):
- Super-valuable and I’m very satisfied!
- Quite good
- Somewhat valuable
- Neither valuable nor worthless
- Somewhat worthless
- Not a good use of time
- Total waste of time
and for the last one, you just say Yes, No or I don’t know, and you also have the possibility to add some optional text if you want to express something.
This is what you would see after the feedback is sent, in this example, we see the following:
The person that attended the strategy workshop feels that for him or she was a waste of time, while at the same time acknowledges that was useful for the rest of the people based on this person perception.
That person doesn’t know if it was valuable for the organization or not.
After the information is sent a black dot will be located on the colored square, where you will see where you are depending on how valuable was for you and for the rest of people, remember! always based on your perception.
How to check the received feedback?
By using the e-mail and code you will see a list of all the topics you have created.
Checking feedback
This is the last view, here you can see all the feedback responses, at the top you have the average based and all responses, and then you have each response, you as the organizer now have valuable information about the perception of the value created of the people who participated in the strategy workshop you organized.
So, now what?
Now you have to draw your own conclusions about this, this case might be little bit silly because there are only two responses and you should be able to get this feedback without using this software, but if you would have 20 responses and 10 of them don’t reflect good perception of value created at individual level it would mean that next time maybe or either prepare better this workshop, or you invite the right people.
