Monday, February 21, 2011

Are we there yet? – Tracking Agile Project for Success (or failure)

Estimating the completion date of Agile Project can be very hard. And even harder is to have that date align with Planned completion date. Usually we plan the scope for every iteration and predict in next ‘X’ iteration we will complete release.  Ideally, ‘X” should be reducing when the project completes few iterations, but the challenge  is ‘X” will seem remain same or mostly increase.

The reason for this could vary depends on whom you ask, but as a agile Project Manager it is very important to get the whole team to visualize the impact and take necessary steps. Extending the time is one of the option (on most cases it is NOT an option)

PBI Historical Velocity

Leveraging PBI historical velocity data will give the prediction on completion date range.  This will move the focus from “if we do this much, we will complete here” to “to complete here, we need to do this much”

PBI velocity aggregates the velocity of team SBIs including PLM or design, Dev and QC. It is the total story points completed in a week with Done-Done-Done (remember testable not shippable)

Week PBI points Done-Done-Done Average Velocity
WK1 10 10
WK2 0 5
WK3 5 3

when you gather the PBI velocity for past few iterations, you can  create some meaningful projections. In the above example, we can clearly see that the velocity is going down.

Average Person Velocity

No, i am not talking here to track individual SBI velocity. This weekly PBI velocity per Person.

Week PBI points Done-Done-Done Total Resources Average Velocity / Person
WK1 10 2 5
WK2 0 2 0
WK3 6 3 2

If you have planned velocity for the team, the above data can be used to benchmark against the planned velocity. This will help to know how much more the team need to work to meet the target date.

E.g. in WK 3 the velocity has come down due to addition of one new person.

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