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by Simon Baker.
Original Post: Developing business awareness and acumen
Feed Title: Agile In Action
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Feed Description: Energized Work's blog.
The single most important benefit brought by the Agile movement to the industry is a sort of Business Awareness. I finally see and hear people, regardless of their official role, talking about business value and how they can help deliver it. I see technical people interested in return on investment, opportunity cost, GDP and sometimes cash flow.
Seeing everything in terms of its inherent business value is a good thing. And it would be better if that business value could be represented as a figure that contributes to the bottom line. Sometimes this is straight forward. Other times, it's not so easy. Everyone involved needs to understand the various monetary factors in a project and how they affect one another. Everyone needs to understand the financial consequences of decisions and actions, or lack thereof. It's not good enough to leave this to project managers or finance people anymore.