Schwartz - The Art Of Business Value

With an engaging writing style, Mark Schwartz builds a case for developing an organizational culture for... IT and other stakeholders to collectively work to define and deliver business value. If you care about how IT can effectively support improved outcomes for your organization, you should read this book.

Richard A. Spires, CEO of Learning Tree International, former CIO of US Department of Homeland Security, and former Deputy Commissioner and CIO of the IRS

Mark Schwartz masterfully deconstructs the overloaded and misunderstood concepts of business value, product owner, and other nebulous value terms. He then introduces us to novel approaches that directly address many of the shortfalls of more traditional systemsfinally helping to plug a gaping hole in much of the Agile literature.

Max Keeler, Chief Projects Officer of The Motley Fool

This book brings together Agile, DevOps and Business Value in a coherent, direct yet humble manner with insights that can only come from an experienced practitioner. At the heart of DevOps is a machinea Continuous Delivery pipeline... The pipeline is an automated bureaucracy... it applies its rules in a rigorous, unemotional way priceless!

Tapabrata Pal, Ph.D., Director & Platform Engineering Fellow, Enterprise Application Platforms

Schwartz calls into question all previously known techniques for assigning business value and provides a sane, modern approach to evaluating priority. Bridging the gap between Agile, DevOps, Lean Startup, Continuous Delivery and the business, he makes his recommendations approachable, couching them as experiments... a must-have book for anybody interested in a better way to align their IT department with the business.

Mike McGarr, Engineering Manager, Netflix

Mark Schwartz

IT Revolution

Portland, Oregon

The Art of Business Value

Copyright 2016 Mark Schwartz

ISBN 978-1-942788-05-8

All rights reserved.

IT Revolution

Portland, Oregon

For quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others, please contact the publisher at .

Cover and book design: Stauber Design Studio

Illustrations: Lauren Simkin Berke

Ebook Design: Digital Bindery

To those who are deploying code.

We can talk all we want about business value, but they are the ones creating it.

1. A mystery solved, in seven chapters.

1. Agile and Lean practices are all about maximizing the business value we deliver. Agile books tell us that business value is important, but none of them seem to tell us what business value is, though they do scatter clues here and there. In this chapter, however, we examine the clues and find that they come to nothing. Business value is a mystery at the core of Agile practice.1
2. Our first step in solving the mystery is to consult the experts. Unfortunately, the experts just deepen the mystery for us.2 It turns out that we need to cast a wider net to catch our elusive target.
3. Good detective work involves observing people. We find that there seems to be a connection between organizational culture and business value. But to understand it, we have to immerse ourselves in corporate culture, rather than reject it or stand apart from it.3
4. What could bureaucracy possibly have to do with business value? A lot, perhaps. Warning: this chapter contains graphic depictions of bureaucracy being applied to agility. You may come away wanting to produce burndown charts in triplicate.
5. Someone has been forgotten in all this talk about business value. She makes a mysterious entrance, claiming to be following the same trail of clues that we are. Or... could it be that she is responsible?
6. Ahathe case (or the CAS) takes a turn. We skip lightly into the fourth dimension, take a look back, and all becomes clear. But youll find no spoilers here in the Table of Contents.
7. We lock up the culprit and explain the tools we have used to solve the mystery. You will begin to see business value as an art and walk away with surprising new ideas on how to go about creating it.

1. 1 cf. Jean-Paul Sartres claim that nothingness lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm, in Being and Nothingness.
2. 2 cf. Dante, The Inferno. It gets worse and worse the deeper you look.
3. 3 Alienation has been covered thoroughlysome might say excessively in The Stranger by Camus and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Melville.

The study of business value seems obvious at firstafter all, over the course of our careers, weve all seen which activities create value and which ones waste everyones time. But what if our grasp of what business value really is, is not quite right to start with? In his new book, The Art of Business Value, the indomitable Mark Schwartz shows us that understanding business value is not as simple as it seems.

For me this book is reminiscent of a book that I love and have read several times over, An Inquiry Into Values, especially the passage in which Robert Pirsig tries to define quality. Similarly, Mr. Schwartz points to many things we already know and have learnedbut then he makes us pause and reevaluate as he shows us how many things we dont know, or didnt adequately question.

A particularly unsettling moment occurred for me when Mr. Schwartz points out that business value is often incorrectly conflated with either customer value or user valuein that moment, the books goal of more precisely defining business value suddenly took on much greater significance and urgency. If we run our organizations to create value, are we correctly defining what types of value we strive to create? How do we measure it? And, by the way, whose job is it to define value, anyway?

Irreverent and whimsical, The Art of Business Value challenges conventional thinking and questions many of the deeply held beliefs of the Agile community. It forces us to examine carefully the concepts and definitions we thought we understood, which, in the end, allows us to define more precisely what business value isso that we can create more of it.

Using a wide-ranging, educational, and scholarly exploration that covers nearly a century worth of organization design, business principles, and software delivery, The Art of Business Value offers a startling and incredibly rewarding journey for the reader.

Fearless and entertaining, this book is ultimately a quest to examine the concept of business valuea concept that we so often take for granted. It provides tools on how to better understand it and, more importantly, create it.

I found reading this book to be immensely satisfying, and I felt more informed and much smarter after reading it. I genuinely hope that you have as much fun and learn as much as I did as you read The Art of Business Value.

Gene Kim

Portland, Oregon

January 2016

Dont for heavens sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.... Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

For the last few years, I have been struggling to bring Agile and DevOps practices into a large federal government agencyseemingly the most inhospitable of environments. As a newcomer to government, my first reaction was one of amazement: How was it possible to throw so many obstacles in the way of good practice? How was it possible to inject so much waste into processes that were otherwise headed in the right direction? What was especially striking, though, was that the obstacles and the waste were being injected by some of the most intelligent people Id ever worked with, and certainly the most committed and well-meaning. It had the feeling of a paradox, set up by some very clever philosopher with two hundred-some-odd years to get the confounding details just right. As an ex-philosophy graduate student, I recognized that there was just one thing to do: approach it with a sense of humor and enjoy the elegance and aesthetic pleasure of an argument well delivered as I figured out its strange internal logic.