What Value do you provide at work?

How do you discover and what value you can provide at work? For a while now we’ve been thinking about this and we’ve come up with something new which I think you will find interesting.

 I’ve been collaborating with my colleague Dan Ashby on this and we’d like to present our first version of the Value Infinity Loop Model. It’s a phase one version and describes five stages that you go through to discover the value that you can provide to your company, firm or business.

The stages are “Discover Value”, “Vision of value add”, “Discover Impact Opportunity”, “Make Impact” and “Measure and Show work”.

What is Value?

“Business value is an informal term that includes all forms of value that determine the health and well-being of the firm in the long run. ... Business value often embraces intangible assets not necessarily attributable to any stakeholder group.” Wikipedia 

So what do I mean by Value? Well, value is how we make teams and individuals better at what they do. That means we help people do things in a better way and faster. We empower people through servant leadership to make good decisions. Value could be about educating people or making people feel good about their interactions with you. Value could be about creating a great experience for the internal or external customer.

Discover Value

So Firstly let’s start with how you discover value? Normally this is determining whether the value you can provide is with the external customer slash end user of your service, or an internal Customer which could be anyone you work with or a team which you can help. By going through this first step you can normally determine what value you can provide and what type of value it is.

Vision of Value add

Let’s Look at our “Vision” of what Value we can add. Normally you understand this from your leadership team and how they perceive value. They should be able to give you a steer of what value looks like at your company. For example should you concentrate on business value, quality of what you provide to the end customer, Morale of the teams and individuals, Improving your technology for your internal or external customer, Should you concentrate on your ways of working and the customer? Or can you alter the structure of how your teams are set up and communicate and interact with each other.

Discover Impact Opportunity

Now if there is no vision from the leadership team you should move onto the next step. This is how do we discover value?

So this could come from two areas. Firstly there could be an explicit “ask” from a manager to get something done. That means you’re asked to enable an opportunity and to do this normally you would “push” yourself onto the team or individual to either obtain information and get involved in helping create that value. Sometimes for example this goes beyond your remit and scope of your role. So this is a push action to get involved in creating value. So this could be helping a new team set up or there is a sudden pivot of work in an opposite direction.

Secondly there could be an internal “pull”. A team identifies how to create value and needs your help. So they pull you into the team to help. Now this still could be outside of your remit of scope but usually you’re pulled in because the team knows you can help.

But how do you make an impact? This relies on understanding the constraints on you and your team and understanding the constraints across your organisation. So this could be areas like your OKR’s or KPI’s which are telling you whether you can help help in creating value for areas across the business.

The other constraints you could have are the existing Operating Principles put in place across your team or organisation. These rules on how you work may prevent you from creating value.

Other constraints are the scope of your role and responsibilities as sometimes you will not have the remit to be able to help. 

You could have conflicting requirements which means being pulled in two different directions or a lack of support from the business to do what you need to do. All these things are constraints on how you make an impact.

If you have some lack of knowledge either through misconceptions or ignorance there is a way out of this constraint through gaining knowledge by training or self-learning. Then you can practice those skills to improve, understand the context or constraints and grow your experience and then hopefully improve by continuous improvement.

Measure and Show Work

Finally we have the Measure and show work stage. This really looks at the three types of measurements from performance statistics you normally get thorough analytics whether that be external like website statistics or internal for example areas like Cycle Time or Time to market.

Customer feedback is a key metric and would hopefully let you know how your product is performing. Then there are decisions made from Experiments you run such as A/B Testing.

 How you show your work and show your value is an important part of the process. Internally this could be through a show and tell to your team, the company or even your stakeholders. It could be through a review showing some of your measurements on your features and whether it has improved or not improved your figures. Remember only through failure do we learn. It could also be through an announcement on Slack or email. Externally it could be to a conference talk, a presentation to shareholders or the board showing the work you have done and the value you have provided.

 After you measure and show your work it may lead you back to discovering more value.

So that’s our model on Value and we welcome any thoughts on the infinity model. It’s a phase one version so hopefully we’ll work to improve this over time.

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David Shrimpton has given conference talks and written articles on Agile and Lean and loves helping individuals through coaching. He is currently working as Head of Agile Coaching at Photobox helping teams and individuals be the best they can be.

If you'd like me to talk at your company or conference please feel free to contact me on Linkedin.

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