What To Do When They Want To Know Cost Per Point w Troy Lightfoot

I had a student recently who was being asked to provide information cost per User Story Point. In this interview with Troy Lightfoot we discuss different strategies you might employ when responding to this request and why management asking for this is such a troubling sign. 

You can find the interview here. 

Probabilistic Forecasting with Troy Lightfoot

If Story Points are not doing it for you, maybe Probabilistic Forecasting will help you figure out when you’ll be able to deliver. Check out my interview w/ Troy Lightfoot on how to stop guessing when stuff will be done.

https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/54062/Probabilistic-Forecasting-with-Troy-Lightfoot 

Agile Estimation - A SoundNotes Tutorial (1/17/19)

A quick tutorial on the LeadingAgile site on how to do Agile Estimation (1/17/19)
http://bit.ly/2FM3kvg

WTF is Cost of Delay?

At some point, seems like about 2 summers ago, it seemed like a lot of really smart people in Agile started talking about Cost of Delay as a great way to understand the relative value of work or projects within an organization. The problem I ran into was, whenever I asked about it, the people who explained it to me (who were always way smarter than me) would quickly leave me even more confused than I was when I started asking the question. For awhile I kind of let it go as "another one of those Agile things I just don't totally get" and resigned myself to just nodding my head when people talked about it. That approach was working pretty well, but it started to bug me that I was just kind of universally punting on the whole topic.

I am very fortunate to work at LeadingAgile where I have a lot of really smart colleagues who are open to letting me ask them lots of questions. So, I decided to take advantage of that and finally try to understand exactly WTF Cost of Delay actually is.  The result of those questions is 3 podcasts, which, if you listen to in order, should not only help you understand it at a conceptual level but also at a level where you can begin to practically apply it.

Each of these podcasts originally was posted on the LeadingAgile site. Links to the blog posts are listed below each podcast.

An Overview of Cost of Delay with Jim Hayden

Original blogpost

Calculating Cost of Delay with Marty Bradley

Original blogpost

"It's not a Math Problem" - Cost of Delay Part 3 with Dean Stevens

Original blogpost