In his Agile Journal article, Calculating Earned Business Value (EBV) For An Agile Project, Rawsthorne has shown how to use EBV to measure how "done" we are from a business perspective. Rawsthorne uses a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to provide structure to an agile project, as a framework for calculating value-based business metrics.
Knowing Earned Business Value can be useful to the business in a number of ways, including:
- The combination of standard burndown charts and EBV value charts provides a good, composite understanding of the progress of a project.
- The business can see when business value returned is not worth the cost of the work being done. This could indicate that the project needs to draw to a close and release.
- If the business knows a project's value to the business, these metrics provide a way to compare projects to see if resources need to be reallocated.