“Moneyball” is lean management
This goes without saying. Michael Lewis’ 2003 book on the purported improbable success of the Oakland A’s is as much a baseball book as “Beowulf” is about a monster. In a 2010 podcast, I cited Moneyball as one of the more valuable pieces of literature on agility in my cannon. It may seem like an odd choice against books by Mike Cohn or Kent Beck, but indeed - it’s a great practical example of trying to maximize the value delivered by each dollar invested.
The crux of Moneyball is that in inefficient markets, small efficiencies can be incredibly disruptive. Billy Beane and his cronies found that baseball was underpaying for productivity that was in fact a more valuable performance indicator than what had been historically measured. The rise of Agile is in effect, the realization that waterfall methods were targeting a measurement of risk mitigation at the expense of change resistance. Agility is simply a response to this assumption with the hypothesis that a business that is solely centered around risk minimization as a driver for growth and innovation is actually an inefficiency - just as measuring batting average and subjective assessments of skill are now accepted as being nearly irrelevant for measuring baseball performance.
Where I diverge from some of my Agile colleagues is that Agile needs to be a measurable business process, and that the key measure of any business process that innovates needs to be value earned. Value earned is the on-base percentage of product innovation. If your teams can look at the investment made in any feature and assess the value produced (and NOT necessarily ROI) - you should have a very sabremetric framework for judging the value of products that are being proposed for delivery.
