Benefit points - what will it take for IT professionals to use them

Just as story points are estimates of the cost of a piece of IT functionality, benefit points are estimates of the intended benefit (value for stakeholders) of that piece of functionality. It seems obvious that one should use benefit points in addition to story points, but benefit points (or similar metrics) are not in widespread use.
Master

You will conduct a case study with interviews and focus groups to investigate what obstacles there are in both mindset and process for using benefit points. You will co-design sketches for tools for using benefit points (or similar metrics) in daily project life.

Goal

To uncover the usability and feasibility of benefit points as estimates for the benefit of a system (value for stakeholders).

Learning outcome

You will learn about benefits management and benefits estimation. You will learn empirical research methods relevant for studying projects (of any kind).

Qualifications

A keen interest in project management and in systematizing qualitative and quantitative empirical data.

Supervisors

Jo Erskine Hannay

References

A book on benefit/cost-driven agile management: Benefit/Cost-Driven Software Development

An earlier masters thesis on the topic: Benefit Points in Scrum: A Design Science Study

Contact person