These are questions project and program managers ask every sprint. On Agile projects, the answers are based on the team’s historical achievements and projected forward using recent results. This leads to greater and greater confidence in the information as the project moves towards release dates, and enables the manager to communicate a roadmap with high confidence of delivering what is promised.

The Agile Project Dashboard
SCRUMmasters has developed and refined a set of management tools that are easily derived from project data available in agile tracking tools such as Rally Developer. These tools provide management with clear visibility into the project costs, release date, and performance against plan on a sprint-by-sprint basis.

Since these tools are based on live project data, they reveal potential delivery problems immediately and point to the root causes well in advance of serious impacts. This provides management with the time needed to correct small problems before they get bigger.

The final tool measures the value delivered against the project costs on a sprint-by-sprint basis. By monitoring this incremental P&L closely, the project steering committee and PMO are able to measure the success of the team against the business case on a very granular level.

By comparing the feed rate of business-valued features to the production cost of the team, it is possible to make decisions on empirical data such as adding scope, stopping or slowing the project, or making changes to the project resources. It is also a potential basis for comparing the performance of one agile team against another.

These are questions Agile team members ask every sprint. When a team does a retrospective, the answers to these can be very subjective. The right set of lightweight metrics provides objective, results-driven feedback that focuses the discussion on areas of highest impact.

Feedback and Management Tools
SCRUMmasters has developed and refined a set of lightweight metrics that can be easily derived from information captured in project tracking tools such as Rally Developer and VersionOne.

These metrics, updated at the end of each sprint, enable the Agile Team to systematically see and remove specific obstacles affecting their performance. They also provide the team with essential feedback on the results and business impact of their efforts on a frequent basis. As the team refines its scrum practices sprint by sprint, these measures show the impact of the changes made in weekly retrospectives.

These metrics also provide a release burn-down that enables the team to track progress against the release goal starting from the third iteration via a release burn-down. Separate burn-downs are calculated for scope, risk and value delivered.