Do you understand why Return on Investment (ROI) should affect decision making?

Last updated by Brook Jeynes [SSW] 4 months ago.See history

An important part of communication is to improve the Product Owner's understanding of ROI and help them make good decisions. When you are actioning a task, it's crucial to value your time and think about how much manual time it may consume over a longer period, say a year. You can then go the extra step and quantify this $ cost.

If you find out that another solution would be better, then you should clearly communicate that to the Product Owner.

In the software world to calculate ROI we take a PBI and do Business Value ÷ Effort

If the Product Owner still disagrees with you then it may be a good idea to send a 'For the record' email.

Figure: Bad Example - ROI was not mentioned

Figure: OK Example - ROI is mentioned

Figure: Good Example - ROI is mentioned and quantified

Note: If fixing the email signatures had been a huge task then it would have been better for Piers to have a conversation with Bob before he implemented the fix.

We open source. Powered by GitHub