I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement. Bonus: the idea is cool.
Plan Your Next Sprint By ROI: Part 1
You’ve got a giant backlog of user stories and product capabilities. How do you determine which stories to implement right now? By the estimated value of each story? Pick the ones the developers want to build next? How about picking the stories that maximize the ROI of the sprint? To […]
Flashback: This Week in the Past on Tyner Blain [Feb 9]
A look back at the best from this week in the past.
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-02-10]
A look back at the best from a year ago
5 Return On Investment Calculation Tips
Return on investment calculation is critical to using ROI for prioritizing requirements. We’ve discussed how to forecast return on investment by estimating costs and predicting benefits. Here are five tips to help you when calculating return on investment.
The following ROI calculation tips are detailed in this article:
1. Recognize the Risks
2. Discount Future Cash Flows
3. Separate Sales From Expenses
4. Overcome Ozymandias Syndrome
5. Ignore Infinite Elvises
Read on for the details…
Prioritization With ROI and Utility
Prioritization with ROI is generally thought of as a quantitative analysis. For hard ROI, that is true. For soft ROI, it is anything but true. You have to make a prediction of the utility of the requirement or feature. That predicted utility is based on our expected utility, which is based on your past experiences. Your past experiences are reflected in remembered utility, which is a function of experienced utility. How can you know with certainty, and use that to prioritize requirements or features?
How To Measure Costs When Calculating ROI
At a high level, it is easy to describe ROI – the return on the investment. But how do we measure the investment? There’s a problem when we have to go to the next level. Some costs are obviously incurred as part of our actions, and some costs happen even if we don’t take the action. We have to allocate those costs across all our actions or we won’t have an accurate reflection of our investment. Without an accurate model of our investment, we can’t calculate the return on our investment.
Definition of sunk cost
Sunk cost is an expression representing the unrecoverable amount of money that has already been placed into an ongoing investment or project. It is one of the simplest, yet most commonly misused financial measurements of a project. We’ll learn how to avoid the most common mistake in project (financial) management, and how to survive when our boss makes the mistake.
Using ROI For Requirements Is A Risky Business
We’ve talked repeatedly about using ROI to drive prioritization of requirements based upon value. ROI can be used as the basis for prioritization for all decision making.
If we fail to take risk into account, our calculations will certainly be wrong, and we may make a poor decision. When we talk about accounting for risk in this context, we mean that we are accounting for the unlikely, undesired, or unintentional outcomes. We use the term expected value to refer to the risk adjusted approximation of the outcome. In financial circles, this is also called discounting.
The most common mistake people make when calculating ROI is failing to take into account the expected value of the return or the expected value of the cost of a project.