To BV or not BV?

Or "Is there value in assigning Business Value to PI Objectives?"

Every now an again you start a discussion with fellow agile coaches and find that there
 are widely different opinions about what makes sense. This happened to me recently.
 The subject was SAFe’s practice of assigning Business Value (BV) to PI Objectives as
 part of the PI Planning event, and the subsequent assessment of the actual Business
 Value as the ART completes work.

 Reactions from “I never coach PI Objectives, or Business Value because it doesn’t add
 value” to “the 1-10 scale makes no sense for a business value assessment” to “PI
 Objectives make sense; Business Value not so much”, and “I’ve seen Business Value
 assessment work well”, and so on.

 Now by way of context, the coaches I am talking with are all very experienced coaches,
 having worked with many organizations on their move to agile, and particularly agile at
 scale. The conversation is not the result of lack of knowledge or experience but rather
 based on a keen understanding of both the purpose of the practice, the why, and
 organizational dynamics in which it will be applied.

 So to review, the reason that SAFe suggests the practice of both PI Objectives and the
 assignment of Business Value is it to:

My experience has been that you can use both PI Objectives and Business Value
 assessment effectively. But I’ve also seen the practice get in the way of progressing
 true change or, worse still, seen organizations simply go through the motions, with no
 collaboration or feedback.

 I suspect that this in the end is the root cause of the different perspectives. I’ve seen the
 practice used very effectively. For example, I attended a PI System Demo recently and,
 as they went through the demonstrations, the Business Owner really closed the
 feedback loop by talking about what the original PI Objective’s expectation was, what
 happened in the meantime, and what the resultant effect was. She was clear about how
 we were all in this together and took pains to stress where the Program troika and the
 management team had contributed to (especially) less than expected results. The
 resultant actual business value assessment made sense.
 

But if this is not happening, then you should not force the practice. What this means is
 that you will need to revisit the purpose of the practice, and determine how you will get
 the same outcome if you do not use this particular part of the framework. For example,
 can the organization agree that the feedback loop is based on features being delivered
 and what does it mean if we do this? Can we evaluate the predictability of business
 value delivered through more direct means, such as a result of the telemetry of released
 product? Should we use PI Objectives without assigning Business Value so we can
 establish this important feedback loop? And so on.

 Like all changes that effect the organization, context matters. And sometimes even
 experienced coaches will have to agree to disagree.