A long time ago, in the jungle of 1980s computerisation, WBA (well before agile), a marketing information analyst and researcher discovered a powerful way to feed a starving elephant, helping it to become infinitely stronger and healthier. That elephant (in the room) was industry’s inability to consistently produce shed loads of business value, success and ROI from the increasingly frenetic maelstrom of computerisation and business-related IT activity of the time.
David Jacobs thus initiated his 30-year quest for value, his ‘MaxVal’ research and development programme. By the late 1990s David had created what is now known as Business Value Maximisation Framework (BVMF)®.
When BVMF® is fed into the mix, underpinning all other methods, approaches and practices, nutritional results and well-being go sky high for the elephant, industry and most importantly the IT business user community and their organisations. This heightened capability arises from an understanding and consequent use of the missing pieces of the business value jigsaw and potentially expands a business analyst’s skillset quite powerfully.
As a preface to running through this second set of models, David will recap on the central questions omitted by most methods that we should be asking (looking after the elephant’s interests) by recapping on the first set of BVMF® models that were covered in August 2023.
Here David continues to provide answers to the questions that other methods skirt around: what value is, what its ingredients are, how to source and mix the ingredients optimally, how to bake the value cake and keep on baking the value cake to be tastier and even tastier.
In this Part II, David covers:
- The Golden Value Circle™ – an overview of the key dependencies for getting maximum business value
- BVMF® concepts Propensity, Macro/Micro, Design/Run Time, Meet/Exceed, Representivity, Predictability
- (More on) the Business Value Equation (BVEQ)™ - to predict and track value for each key ingredient…
- The Conceptual Units of Benefit (CUB) Ladder™ - to show the crucial relationships between ‘requirements’, IT functions, business process steps and project/work activities…
- (More on) the 1934 Model™ and Step Diagram™ - how they help us to choose the best approach for each piece of work
- (More on) Layers of Focus (LoF)™ - an expansion of the design time Value Delivery Model (VDM)™ presented back in August 2023
- An introduction to Optimal Human-Computer Interaction (OH-CI)/Football Team Management (FTM)™ - these help to accord to the principles of Automation Redefined, i.e., to create optimally powerful, perfectly blended human-computer teams
Finally, to address the never-ending pursuit of business value, David will introduce The Crossword Diagram™ ‘decomposition’ approach to facilitate essential continuous improvement (CI) of levels of value being manifested.
In A Closer Look At The Elephant (Part III) in spring 2024 (date tbc), David will cover the Crossword Diagram™ in more detail and introduce Business Practice and Contingency (BP&C)™. BP&C ensures any computer supported process will be (much) better than any erstwhile incarnations, operationally, at run-time. David will also outline further BVMF® concepts and techniques like Comparative Value Measurement (CVM)™ and end by running through the IT Business Value Capability Assessment (ITBVCA)™ that, using The IT Effectiveness Spectrum™’s value criteria, is a way to systematically raise capability to produce value, success and ROI in a more forceful and consistent way.
As interest has significantly increased in BVMF® in recent years, via his company MaxVal Consultancy Ltd, David is training and certifying business analysts and other business IT professionals. Why not attend and see how understanding what the elephant in the room consists of can boost your ability as a BA to engender value for your organisation?
Biography
David has presented on IT Business Value Maximisation with BVMF® to audiences that have included the British Computer Society’s Project Management Group (BCS PROMS-G), the Association of Project Management (APM), the National Computing Centre (NCC) and the Post Office’s business analysis team. David has been an IIBA UK mentor since 2021 and presented several times on Value Maximisation kicking off his ‘Elephant in The Room, A Closer Look’ series in August 2023.
David has had a number of articles published, made contributions to books and recorded a podcast for business seniors which is available on Spotify under The Independent Minds, on IT success and business value maximisation.
David’s style is honest and entertaining. His webinars are insightful and effective, like the techniques he has devised to support us all being able to breathe optimally nourished life into the elephant!
A senior business analyst who recently gained an accreditation in BVMF® said, “Business Value Maximisation Framework (BVMF®) is an extreme version of common sense; I wish I had known about it years ago.”
MaxVal Consultancy’s website for BVMF® is at www.Maximum-Value.co.uk
David founded Do IT Better Consortium (DIBC) in 2014, see www.DoITBetterConsortium.co.uk
