Agile Development Blog

Yesterday, I mentioned a Rally client team I visited that was concerned about the Rally tool’s inability to create individual team member burndown charts.  We swam through that torrent of misperception only to enter a shark-infested tank around all of the overhead involved in adopting Scrum. Wait! Isn’t Agile supposed to cut costs, not add them? Big overhead sounds like cost and waste to me. Where is this overhead? We quickly zeroed in on their overhead: the Sprint Backlog. Specifically, what should be tracked in the Sprint Backlog?

To start the conversation, they told me that they are always 100% allocated. Huh? “What do you mean you assume 100% allocation?” They helped me understand that, in the Sprint Backlog, they assumed that they worked 8 dedicated hours everyday. For them, Sprint Backlog should reflect all of that time.

This was followed up with, “So how do we plan for work that we didn’t know would come up, like production issues?“  Clearly, they hadn’t read Slack by Tom DeMarco or heard of the Theory of Constraints and The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and the notion of buffer. So, we had a few things to clarify around this “process overhead”:

• What goes in the Sprint Backlog?
• How do you allocate your time effectively?
• How do you “plan” for unplanned work?

In this first post on the Sprint Backlog and using Agile to cut costs, I’ll concentrate on the first bullet:

What goes into the Sprint Backlog?

The Sprint Backlog emerges from the Sprint Planning meeting as the team:

• Identifies the highest priority value items
• Breaks them into tasks
• Determines the effort necessary to complete the value items
• Commits as a team

We cut costs by only committing to and tracking the highest priority items that deliver value in that timebox.

We cut overhead by not tracking items in the Backlog that do not contribute to the potentially shippable product increment.

So back to our overprocessed team. We opened up the Rally tool and moved to their Iteration Backlog view. I saw over 50 items, at least. And then, I understood.

The team was putting EVERY task they do throughout the timebox into the Sprint Backlog, whether it added value to the product increment or not.

Imagine having to track all of your day’s activities. Imagine having to, 2-4 weeks in advance, absolutely commit to these full days’ worth of activities. So, indeed, here was the overhead. Vacation days were in the Sprint Backlog: they had 8 hours of effort. Holidays were in the Sprint Backlog: again 8 hours of effort. The book club had to be tracked separately for each individual who attended it.

The result was that the overall team’s Sprint Backlog would show effort being completed, backlog items being marked “Completed”, the burndown chart burning down nicely, and yet no work of product value was started or in progress. This was not a tool issue; this was an Agile adoption issue.

What is the lesson in all of this?

Be careful about what you choose to track in your Sprint Backlog.

Ensure that what you commit to in that Backlog reflects the delivery of product value.

Abiding by this simple guideline will not only dramatically reduce process overhead, but it will also ensure that what we DO choose to track, whether through a taskboard or an automated tool, is work that is intended to produce product value by the end of the timebox.

Now about their allocation percentages and how it contributes to overhead. That is fodder for another post.

Further Reading:

• Part 2: How Do You Allocate Your Time Effectively?
• Part 3: How Do you Plan for Unplanned Work?

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:

1. charting the initial Sprint Planning meeting team-wide commitment to the valued items the team can deliver in a timebox
2. prompting the daily inspection of what is the most important thing the team must do today to meet that commitment
3. 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.