I will be speaking at BCS Edinburgh! I am very excited to meet the BCS community and spend some time in lovely Edinburgh. If you are interested, sign up here.

Abstract

Most organisations don’t suffer from a lack of innovative ideas, they suffer from not being able to pick the best of what turns out to be a bad bunch. Thanks to the consumerization of IT and software eating the world this is getting worse. Innovation and software development is already synonymous in most organizations. As Jack Welch says: If you are not moving at the speed of the marketplace you’re already dead – you just haven’t stopped breathing yet.

So how do we improve the way we prioritise to ensure that we’re delivering value quickly and not wasting our precious capacity to innovate? Since economics is all about scarcity, we can turn to economics to help us quickly discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value. This session examines how a Fortune 500 company used Cost of Delay across a $100m portfolio to:

1. Improve Prioritisation – by using CD3 (Cost of Delay Divided by Duration)
2. Improve Decision-making – by making the economic trade-offs visible
3. Change the Focus – from efficiency and cost to speed and value

The talk concludes with before and after results and a retrospective: what worked well, what we would do differently, what we learned and what still puzzles us.