SEPTalks: Delivering in Bets: How Betting Will Improve Your Delivery Strategy

Defining a delivery strategy can be difficult. We tend to underestimate the risk, aren’t explicit about our assumptions, and don’t involve the delivery team early in the process. Chris Shinkle, our Director of Innovation, recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea is that each delivery is a series of bets with different odds and risks. Each bet or investment can be matched with corresponding confidence levels. For those bets deemed risky, we can improve our odds by placing smaller bets. Delivering in bets helps remain outcome focused, look at our decisions as a portfolio, and express the expected timeframe of payouts. In each case, mindsets shifted and delivery performance improved.

During Chris Shinkle’s April SEPTalks event, he demonstrated how using bets reshapes the way clients approached delivery. He showed how using some familiar tools such as Story Mapping and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results and discussed different methods for defining and sizing releases.

The full session can be viewed below: