In accounting, money is not just green, but also comes in two flavors: it comes out of the capital budget or it comes out of the operating budget. If it comes out of the capital budget, then we can defer the recognition of these costs until we actually start selling the result of the effort. If it comes out of the operating budget, the costs drop straight to the bottom line affecting your profitability immediately.
But here is a larger issue. Most of the accounting advice for capitalization was written assuming a waterfall approach. What does this mean? If you fail to take notice of capitalization issues you could end up costing your company millions, or the other way, stopping your company from improving their bottom line. And, if left unchecked this could become an important impediment to your continued use of an agile approach as you try to adapt waterfall reporting requirements to your agile implementation.
The good news is that once you have worked through the issue you will find the agile implementation actually makes it easier to capitalize work, with more transparency and consistency. And it takes very little effort from the people doing the agile work.
In software development, we have established rules to determine if it is capital or operating work. A simple distinction is that if the work is associated with a future release, then it can be capitalized; whereas, is if it is associated with maintenance work, it cannot.
A release is a candidate for capitalization if:
Releases that meet one or all of these criteria can have their costs capitalized starting at concept approval. Capitalization for qualified projects formally begins with approval of the Project Concept document.
With these definitions in place we then:
Fully burdened cost of a person: $150K / year
Average number of people on a Team: 8
Fully burdened cost of a Team: 8 x $150K = $1200K / year
Velocity of the Team for this Iteration: 50 points
> Sum of Story Points delivered in this Iteration: 10 points
Percentage work in this iteration that can be capitalized: 10 / 50 = 20%
Dollar value of work that can be capitalized for this Iteration: 20% x $1200K / 26 (as $1200 is per year) = $6240
NOTE: Knowing information like fully burdened cost of a Team is pretty good practice anyway. Iterations (or Sprints) mean we are spending money and so we should be asking ourselves whether we are making good investments; will we get return for the dollars we are spending.
Many people worry that Story Points do not help us estimate effort. They are, after all, “estimates” with the additional problem of being “unit less” - how does that work? The reality is that point based estimates provide a more realistic view than time tracking systems.
It turns out that a story point view of estimated effort is highly correlated with actual work time. Agile practices help teams drive toward high correlation between estimated points and actual time. One goal of agile is to improve overall forecasting starting with the commitment made during sprint planning. Teams that embrace agile estimating principles examine their estimation points and outcomes, trying to ensure that their sprint forecasts are roughly met by the sprint result. If there is wide variation, teams would discuss improvements at a retrospective (see What Can We Do To Improve Our Point Based Estimates? for specific ideas on this).
In many ways the approach leads to better tracking of effort. When we track stories, estimation points and completion dates (sprint end dates), we know exactly which team did the work, we usually have a day-by-day task burndown and we have a proportional allocation (see How Do I Convert Points and Velocity to Dollars? for more information). The stories are well documented and understandable (thanks to the user voice form). Team members say the same thing executives say when asked about work as there is a common language and understanding. This means when someone sees something a report and want to ask more detailed questions, no matter where that query leads, there will be a common understanding.
Interestingly, if you do the analysis, and create frequency charts (e.g. How long does it take to complete a 2 point story) the data reflects this consistency. (A version of this kind of analysis can be seen at Our Estimates are Terrible!)