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:

• It is a major new release, containing significant amounts of new functionality.
• It is a minor release or service pack containing new functionality along with fixes or re-design of existing functionality that will significantly improve the quality of the product.
• It is a major or minor release that contains a significant platform or technology upgrade that will extend the life of the product in the market.

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:

• Mark, label, tag, or otherwise attribute work to indicate whether something is “capitalizable” or not. This could be done at whatever level makes sense for you. If you have a strong relationship between Epics and Stories, and you feel the Epics are defined so they differentiate capitalized work for other work, then you might set things up so that the Epic tracks “capitalization”, and just use assume that anything associated with that Epic can be used in the calculation for capitalization.
• Develop an understanding of the fully burdened cost of a Team or Team of Teams. This is calculated by summing up the fully burdened cost of a person each person on a Team. Usually organizations will use an overall average across all Teams to be the fully burdened coast of a Team to simply calculations. A typical calculation is:

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

• Track the velocity of the Team for each Iteration or Sprint. If you are using Scrum you are probably doing this already. If you are using Kanban, you'd track Throughput per unit time (e.g. every two weeks). For the sake of an example, lets say:

Velocity of the Team for this Iteration: 50 points

• To calculate how much of the Iteration (or Sprint) can be capitalized, sum up the number of Story Points that associated with the “capitalization” tag, and that get delivered in that Iteration (or Sprint). Divide that sum by the Velocity of that Iteration (or Sprint) to get a ratio, then multiply that ratio by the fully burdened cost of a Team for an Iteration (or Sprint). If using Kanban, use a similar approach based on counts of tickets getting delivered over the calculation period. Continuing with the example:

> 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.

• Perhaps the best description of the approach is by Dan Greening - Why Agilists Should Care About Capitalization". The approach and results described here exactly mirror my experiences (so I won't write it up again:-))
• How Do I Convert Points and Velocity to Dollars?
• Our Estimates are Terrible!
• What Can We Do To Improve Our Point Based Estimates?