It’s interesting how often we lose focus on this in day to day work. We get so bogged down in the meetings, processes, fighting with tools and platforms, etc. that occasionally we forget why we are in the office in the first place. For most of us in IT we have one simple task - provide value to the business. For developers that is adding new profitable function to systems, or maintaining existing systems so that they keep generating profit. The systems are in-house public-facing, where the system provides a service to customers; in-house private-facing, where the system enables other staff within the company to do their jobs in providing business value; or saleable software products, where the revenue is the sale (or rental for service models) of the software itself.

Scott Adams once mentioned in one of his books that a good path to software engineering success was to focus on the tasks which directly produced value. He’s right. If you don’t pay attention you spend your (valuable) time doing stuff that isn’t producing value.

For every task I have in my day on a client site, my first thought is ‘is this valuable?’ If not I’ll be thinking what I can do instead which is of more value. For purely feature development tasks, this is easy - the product owner defines the business value of each story. It’s their call, and job done. For the other things that fill the day, it requires a bit more effort to focus on value.

A simple example is the cost of meetings. Meetings are scarily expensive - do they provide enough value to justify themselves? A one hour meeting for a team of eight is more than a developer day used up. We’re not cheap. A one hour meeting for a department or town hall easily costs thousands of pounds. In a team meeting, is everyone focussed on making the meeting as productive as possible? Simple steps are to send out an agenda, or even just a list of questions to be answered by the meeting before it happens, staying on topic during the meeting, and standing up and leaving as soon as the goal of the meeting has been achieved. The 5 minutes waiting for everyone to amble into the room, and the 5-10 minutes nattering as the meeting winds down costs money.

Personally I have a preference for having more short meetings as opposed to having fewer longer ones. It’s not that big a deal to get everyone to stand up and walk into a meeting room. If the meeting starts promptly and ends quickly, it’s not a big interruption in people’s days. If you can get the goal completed in 15 minutes rather than 30 minutes, do that. Get in, get it done, get out. If people go off topic or start into reciting long epics, bring them back on topic - keep the meeting moving.

Shared at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-value-meetings-donal-stewart