(2016-09-22) Corey Haines Methodology Per Business

Corey Haines gave a talk at NCSA Sports. Some crude notes (very possibly mis-summarizing)...

The goal is Agility, not "Agile". (cf Business Agility)

Each business you work at needs its own process. (One Methodology Per Project)

At one place (is this always true? always true under high-growth?), he concluded that probable value-per-feature was exponential (Power Law, Pareto principle) (meaning the biggest wins would be multiples-bigger than the medium wins, not just a bit different), and this swamped the difference in cost-per-feature. Therefore

• you didn't need much precision in Business Value, just picking biggest winners (cf Prioritize BottleNeck)
  • the key challenges with this model I've found:
    • not having any big wins - this is a sign you need to focus on Idea Generation, but many people are resistant
    • having all your big wins be really too big (in cost) (or, more to-the-point, un-chunkable), so you get 0 value until you spend 20 man-years which you don't have, so you have to go back to Idea Generation
• you could ignore cost (Estimating) (at this level)
  • cf "too big to do" point above