The "Value Question"

The most important question Customers are dealing with and TBM Offices get challenged on is: "Are we delivering value with our TBM Program?"
Together with the Apptio Customer Success Organization many practitioners are trying to assess the current state of value delivery and improve it wherever possible.

However, although this question is so central for every TBM practice it still might also be the most difficult question to answer for most organizations out there.

This blog post is providing methods and techniques to address to improve the answer to the "Value Question"!

Let us start with the most obvious and still most important: What is value?
If we understand how value can be defined in a TBM and Apptio context, it will be much easier to address the question on measuring and improving value.

If I asked the readers of this article, how you define value, I'd most likely get a lot of different definitions. In fact, this is one of the questions I challenge the attendees of our TBM courses a lot, and every time I am surprised by the good but unique answers.

What is value?

There are several levels on which value can be defined or seen - let me give you some examples in an Apptio context:

• "We have 50 different data sources contributing to our model which are updated daily."
• "The model has zero fallout, all allocations are driver-based and weighted by operational information."
• "We created custom reports with drill downs to line-item level for any question to be answered."
• "Our data completeness and accuracy is nearly at 100%."

All of those statements seem to prove a very good and valuable TBM Program - however, this is not what we ultimately define as "TBM is delivering value to the organization".

Let us look at an example we might come across in our personal lives:

Summer vacations were pretty delicious and lazy. Therefore we are planning to invest into some fitness device like an elliptical.
How can we judge what to buy and which one is delivering the most value for us?

There are different ways to judge if a fitness device is or was a good purchase for us:

1. Machine Centric: Looking at the machine itself: How is it built? Is the material of high quality? Does it look durable?
2. Exercise Centric: Thinking about the things we can do with it - what type of exercises, resistance options and guides on programs etc.
3. Person/Process Centric: We are looking at the contribution it has to our process of losing weight - How do we benefit from exercising with it? Are we losing weight? Are we getting healthier?

When we talk about the value and impact such a device has for us, we always want to go beyond the machine or exercise centric perspective. We need to judge its impact towards our journey, and our process to achieve the goal. This is the most important takeaway of this section:

"Value is always judged by the consumer of a product/service - it is people or process-centric!"

If we transfer this logic into our TBM program, we can find a lot of similarities. There are also different levels or different value perspectives. And here the same logic applies - we need to go beyond the Data Centric or even Report Centric view of our TBM Program. It is important to judge the value by the consumers of the information and the business process supported by it: 

Process Driven Value

It is not only the persona perspective that can help to assess the value your TBM Program is delivering. As said before, processes can be a crucial part of your journey to value. Processes are driven by people and data and they usually are recurring. Sometimes customer tell me, that they are not mature enough and that they do not have process on various topics like "Application Portfolio and Lifecycle Management". But just because a process is not formalized, it does not mean it is not there. In the mentioned example Application Owners still might talk to their colleagues on business side on the benefit or usage of the application. They even might get challenged regularly on the license cost by their CIO. Although there is no formal "Application Portfolio and Lifecycle Review" Process, the discussions are happening and can be supported by insights the TBM Team can provide.

If you think about processes that can be supported, always think about:

• Who is regularly talking to whom?
• About what topics are they talking?
• Do they have all the needed information for that conversation? How much effort is it to get that information?
• Are they missing out on some important aspects, due to missing data? People don't know, what they don't know!

But don't be afraid, there is no need to start from scratch. There are best practices and predefined process for all the discipline - from traditional IT Financial Management, over Agile Resource Planning to FinOps Processes.>

This is an example for the ApptioOne Domain, that you can use as blueprint to check, if those processes are existing and currently supported by your TBM Practice:

Yeah, you made it to the end - I hope this article had some value in itself (pun absolutely intended) and contained ideas and starting points for your individual journey to increase the value that you are providing to your organization via our tools!