I'm tired of people misusing the word agile so I need a new word for what it is that I have come to know as "agile".

I'm going to call it "Money driven development"

it's very simple. You choose a length of time between 1 and 4 weeks as your iteration length. You make a list of all the things you want in your project. Then you order them by how much MONEY they will make your company.

Not just when they're released but over the LONG haul. You have to calculate the TCO, ROI, ROC, all of that junk that should be figured out before you do anything anyhow. Now, no one sneaks anything into the feature that doesn't make it's money earned higher and especially nothing that would make it's money earned lower!

Then you do the iteration and you only do as many things in the iteration as you can possibly do with the people you have. You just ask them, ccan you do this? if they say no, then you break that thing into two pieces and then put a money value to them. Whichever one is worth more money you ask the team, Can you do this one?

repeat that until they say yes, then you do it!

pretty easy no?

here's an example of the money list, you can make it in excel!

ROI:$200,000: Feature a. Team sizing: 1 relative point

ROI: $399,000 Feature b. Team sizing: 2 relative points

ROI: $199,800: Feature c. Team sizing: 1 relative point

ROI: $199,700: :feature d. team sizing: 1 relative point

See you just order them by whichever one makes you the most money. And you don't let the team do more than they have normally done before. So if the team did 2 relative points last iteration, we let them try to do 2 this iteration.

Isn't it amazing. It's like no one's ever thought of it before ...

hah hah hah.