RallyDev.com
Tue 24 Feb 2009
What’s in a name, like Burndown Chart?
In this post, I’d like to comment on a request from a Rally client I recently visited. Their tool request? A burndown chart for each individual. We were in a small meeting and my intent had been to help them with their Agile adoption. “No, Jean, it is your Rally tool that is the problem.” Hmmmm. Let’s take a look. What seems to be the problem? “Your tool is not helping our ScrumMaster and management team track individual team members’ burndown during the Sprint. We absolutely have to have that.” Huh? I had to call foul and get the group to step back and talk about “What’s in a burndown chart and why?”
Individual team member tracking in a burndown chart is a bad smell. It suggests that the commitment made in the Sprint Planning meeting is not a team commitment. It also suggests that the management is not tracking value delivery, but rather team work. I dug further with this group about that. Each individual at this organization was expected to commit exactly to the number of hours any of their tasks would take, and stick to it. That commitment was meant to never change. If a team member was “taking too long” (which they claimed could only be known via individual burndown charts), management would then be able to “do something” about it. What happened to the Daily Standup for team check-in? But I digress.
Tracking in a burndown chart is meant to trace team commitment around the valued items it intends to deliver. At the end of the Sprint Planning meeting, it reflects the team’s initial estimate of effort to achieve that value delivery. During the Sprint, the burndown chart reflects daily, “Are we going to meet our commitment to delivering this value? If not, what is the single most important, the highest priority thing we must do today?” Finally, the burndown chart informs the Sprint Demo and Review about what happened with the team’s commitments to value delivery versus what they were able to complete.
What’s in a name? Well, when it is a burndown chart, there are three things:
- charting the initial Sprint Planning meeting team-wide commitment to the valued items the team can deliver in a timebox
- prompting the daily inspection of what is the most important thing the team must do today to meet that commitment
- informing the the team at Sprint review to evaluate how the team’s estimates and commitment compared to what value the team was able to deliver
About the Author: Jean Tabaka is a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
I agree that individual burndowns can be bad. And certainly given the scenario you’re painting it’s obviously being used inappropriately. However I have found good use for individual burndowns, not for management but for the team members themselves. It’s just another data point if used correctly. I know most Agile guru’s would disagree. But that’s my feeling. I found that knowing my velocity helped me with my estimates over time and with my ability to commit to the team.
Jack
blog.agilebuddy.com
http://www.agilebuddy.com
I agree with Jean and Jack perspective. As Jack said the burn downs can be one of the data point and historical data for further use in the organisation.
When we closely look into the Agile project management, it advocates for the individuals to take the end to end responsibilities in delivering the project or module. If that is the case, in each and every stand up meeting the burn down chart will be the input and exit criteria for discussion. And also it is the best tracking tool for monitoring the individuals task for completion. So I can summarize that the burn down chart can be usefull as a tracking tool than the data points. Hope this helps.
-Ilango
I like the idea of using individual burndown chart to track my own commitments that I made to the team. I don’t know if I am opposed to sharing them in order to create the team’s burndown. I mean if you have a team of 3 or 4 and are tracking the burndown it’s kind of hard not to know what each individual contributor is doing.
Hell Jean, I agree with Jack (and most of the Agile world) that individual burndown tracking is the individual’s responsibility for building his/her own estimating skills.
It might be a good idea to pull out some of the published performance management material for your Rally client. People will tune their performance for the criteria by which they are measured. If they are being measured as individuals, they will perform as individuals to optimize their individual performance at the expense of the team.
At Agile’s core is that teams are self organizing and performance is measured at a team level. Perhaps there needs to be some executive level Agile education?
I haven’t used an actual “burndown” for individuals, but the spreadsheet I have offered to (and used by) many of the teams I have coached has some individual “tracking” in it.
There is a table that totals up all the hours each person has committed to, then divides by the number of days in the Sprint to see how many hours per day each person is saying they will be spending during the Sprint. At the end of Sprint Planning, this shows what kind of “balance” exists among Team members. Then, as each day passes, the hours left per person is calculated and divided by the number of days remaining in the Sprint to see that same balance day by day.
This is not used to track individual velocity but to make sure (a) initial estimates are reasonable and (b) risks are managed. We do this by targeting ~6 hours per day per person at the outset and then making sure hours stay <=8 per day. If either number is exceeded, it’s something the Team talks about to determine what the risks are, if someone else has the time to help out, etc.
So it is not used to measure individuals but to make sure the overall Team commitments are understood and felt to be manageable by the Team. This has helped a lot since I have been involved largely with coaching distributed teams where it isn’t easy to see, all the time, how activity may be progressing and the daily visibility into effort commitment helps keep everyone aware of what the burndown is saying about the effort left. Indeed, sometimes the official burndown chart looks okay, but the individual hours will reveal an issue because one person may be ahead in their effort while another is behind. The burndown balances out overall, but does not reveal the individual situation that could be a problem if it continued.
Again, the Team decides what the data means to them and what they need to do about it, if anything. But it has been useful to Teams in their planning and daily tracking.
This desire to have individual burn-downs for managers to look at, also presumes several incorrect assumptions. One, that individuals commit and deliver value independent of the team. Two, that the team is a linear combination of the individuals on the team. Three, that the team will become better at delivery by holding their focus (and their feet) on the fire of putting in one’s time. Fourth, that individual burn-down measures output, and in a non-intrusive way. Fifth, that outside intervention into the team is the only reliable means of improving the team. Sixth, that one team needs multiple managers.
The team’s burn-down measures delivery by the team to their customers. If that’s an issue, then that’s the issue to address. But calling for individual burn-down charts for use by managers indicates dysfunction outside the team. “Lack of trust” is often top of that dysfunction list.
Thank you all for your replies. I have to admit that I am surprised at the number of responses that fully or mildly support the notion of individual burndown charts. Let’s try to look at this from a different perspective. If you really need individual data about anything, I propose that you track individual burndown by STORY/TASK, NOT by individual person. The goal of the burndown chart is to tell if the ITEMS (Stories/Tasks) are getting DONE to the committed “Definition of Done”. That is what it is meant to inform. If an item isn’t getting done, we turn to the team and ask them the causes.
Tracking individual team member’s burndown suggests to me what Joseph said (so please read through his comments to get them.) It is some sense of distrust of team and hence a need to hold greater accountability for the individual.
To reiterate, what Scrum and Agile ask us to track is item doneness. Effort is simply the measure of whether the committed items are going to get done. To Drew’s comment, I think some Agile executive education is in order to fully grasp this paradigm shift.
Does this help?
And, again, thanks all for your comments. They are helping me to think this through and offer some clarity around my post!
Individual Burndown is not just a bad smell, it seems to me to be a whole heap of dung. I use a burndown that give the individuals a field to tell the others they have picked up the task listed.
If the individual uses this to track his/her own burndown, I advise against it. Scrum IS about team effort, “doing” something about a not performing team member is SO wrong it curls my toes. Management is not supposed to influence anything within the team, if they can “do something” about someone they deem to not perform in the team the scrum master needs to think about being in the right place.
Self empowerment (through trust) is very important to the motivation of a team. If teammembers are singled out for their perceived bad performance this disturbes the team and their motivation. Scrum will hopelessly fail and be contorted in some hideous control framework for management to play with.
(my two cents)
Thank you Jeroen! You said it with stronger language than me, but I am glad to support you with 3 cents! The burndown really is about the work not about individuals performance. Misuse of it leads to all kinds of bad smells.
Good call jean. The burndown is a ’sensor’ for seeing the health of the team and finding out how focused they are. Going up rapidly, maybe they found a bunch of new tasks or didn’t decompose enough early on. Flat lining, maybe the customer can’t decide on a requirement or the team hasn’t updated the sprint backlog in a while. Burning down too fast, maybe the team didn’t take enough or hasn’t discovered all the facts! Burning down too perfectly, maybe the team is sandbagging to make things look good, or maybe they’re right on track.
We often have managers ask questions only when the burn down looks “bad”.
Scrum doesn’t care if it’s good or bad news, only that there’s news. And don’t believe a perfect burndown means things are going smoothly.
I find it damaging when managers question burn downs that don’t look good… leaving employees to think that they have to fudge until it looks good like they did back in waterfall.
Lastly, and more to the point. Scrum doesn’t concern itself with individual accountability. Only team accountability. If you start focusing on individual performance then they’ll go right back to only caring about individual contribution.
Are we talking Scrum Master or Project Manager here?
Surely a burn down chart is to show the overall performance of the project not to track the performance of individual team members.
With the best will in the world, if individual burn down chart information is available the management chickens will want to see it. Once this happens it will not be long before fingers start being pointed and you end up with a group of individuals watching their backs rather than a coherent team. Then bang go the benefits of Scrum.
It is the Scrum Masters job to protect the team from this sort of threat so the team can work more efficiently. I know that the Scrum Master role is not always easy, having to balance the needs of the team with the needs of management, but this seems to lean too far towards serving managements immediate needs at the risk of the longterm needs of the project and the ultimate benefits management will receive.
I can’t agree with the last few comments more. Scrum is all about the team, not the individual, per se. It is based on team accountability, trust, and cohesiveness. If members of the team want to see their own velocity by means of an individual burndown, then give them the tool. It most certainly should not be something that happens during the standup or in a team environment unless all have agreed to it and the intention makes sense (Retrospective?) as well as timing.
Again, thanks all, and thanks Rebecca. I am still concerned about individuals believing they should track their own burndowns if they want to.
A burndown is about committed items and whether they are going to get done or not. It is not about someone’s burned up hours and therefore they have run out of time.
And to jump in from another perspective, when adopting Agile, the organizational goal should be to eliminate as much bloat and waste, anything non-value-add, as possible. Adding in individual burndowns is the opposite of slimming down. It is yet more process! Just not getting my head around adding more metrics and process, especially not at the individual level.
But keep the ideas coming!
Am I missing something?
Tracking individual burndown leads to team members maximizing their own individual output. This is suboptimal as we are concerned with the team output.
As many others noted, it also hinders team commitment, and can lead to other unwanted effects like competition.
What you measure is important because people will behave differently if you measure different things.
… you get what you ask for …
Erik, I am glad that you too are emphasizing the power of team commitment and hence the need to only measure what you want to improve….team commitment! That means the team learns to hold itself accountable for what it commits to, how it formulates that commitment, and how truly committed each team member is. Thanks for your post!