What do you do when they start asking for cost per point?
This issue often arrives wrapped in requests that are pure in their intent and seem to be reasonable requests from the business…
How much are we spending each month and how many points are we delivering for that spend?
or
Since we are now estimating work in User Story Points, we need to be able to determine how much to charge for the work that clients are asking for. So how much does a point cost us?
or
We need to evaluate the change requests so we can decide which ones to move forward with and which ones to reject. We’re estimating them in User Story Points, which gives us a relative idea of risk, complexity, and effort, but not cost. We need to be able to translate points to dollars so we can understand if the value we’d receive from the change is worth the cost.
I had a student recently who was qetting requests like this from the business, so I asked Agile Coach Troy Lightfoot to join me for a podcast where we could unpack the issues that often come with the cost per point question, the pros and cons of tracking it, and some things to take into account when you formulate your response to the request.
Links from the Podcast
Probabilistic Forecasting Podcast interview with Troy Lightfoot
https://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2019/05/probabilistic-forecasting-with-troy.html
Story Points Revisited (from Ron Jeffries Blog) https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/story-points/Index.html
Contacting Troy
Agile Uprising: http://www.agileuprising.com/board-of-directors/
Agile Uprising Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Je8H5C