Business Value Auction

The Business Value Auction is a useful tool that helps to objectively evaluate the business value of different tasks or sub-projects within a team or company.
Using this template, you as a team get a structured basis for discussion to effectively weigh the relevance of different projects and requirements together with your stakeholders and set priorities.

And this is how it works:

Before the meeting:

1. Decide which stakeholders you need in the appointment and record them in the template on the left.
2. Collect the different requirements in the project in the middle block.
   Tip: To ensure a good understanding of the requirements during the meeting, you may want to add bullet point information to help the other participants better understand the requirements and their impact.
3. Record your project goal / product goal in the canvas for all to see.

During the meeting:

Step 1: Welcome the participants and explain the goal as well as the process of the workshop and briefly go into the project goal. If you have enough time, a short check-in is a good way to set the framework.

Step 2: Then start with the left column. Each:r stakeholder has a certain budget, in the form of tokens. They all have the same number of tokens, which they can distribute among the various requirements according to their own assessment of business value. How they distribute their tokens is according to their own perspective.

Step 3: When all tokens are distributed, discuss the picture that emerges using the discussion questions on the right.

• It is central that all participants come into the discussion. Reasons for distribution are therefore essential.
• If the facilitator:in gets the feeling that the discussion is no longer focusing on the benefit to the product / project vision, briefly refer to the product / project goal in the canvas and ask to evaluate the requirement in light of it.

Step 4: Next, record the action items on sticky notes. You can also use the guiding questions as a guide.

Tips:

• Invite the pre-identified participating stakeholders early on. (Caution: An excess number of stakeholders can prevent the desired clarity).
• Define the project or product goal in advance and record it in the canvas for maximum transparency.
• Feedback from the core stakeholders should be gathered early in the project.
• The customer is not always the same as the user:in

Benefits of the exercise:

• Shared understanding through stakeholder alignment.
• Open discussion of interests
• Transparency regarding dependencies
• Visual component promotes easy overview
• Understanding external stakeholders can increase business value
• Team dynamics can be optimized by understanding internal stakeholders
• Possibility to integrate feedback from core stakeholders at an early stage