How Timelines Help Track Progress
… no matter if it’s Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, lean, XP, or some mix/intermix of these agile — or non-agile — software development methodologies (or buzzwords, if you will).
Managers/leads/teams/stakeholders want to track progress for any software development project they’re accountable for, small or large. Sometimes they want to track progress not only in one, but in many projects at a time, and they want to be able to do this fast and conveniently. A timeline is a a visual tool that helps accomplish this. Let’s take a closer look in which way.
Regardless of the software development methodology used, projects are meant to be completed and tracked through to completion. However, at times project managers feel tied to by-the-book canons of Kanban (which is viewed by many as the best visual management system there is, but allows no time-boxing), or of Scrum (which has time-boxed iterations and releases but falls short with the visual part). What if a project manager wants to get the best both of Kanban, as of a visual board, and of Scrum? Obviously, if projects have deadlines, one can not live by the classical pull & flow formula of Kanban only.
For progress tracking, Scrum allows just one visual report, the burn down chart. When we want to keep an eye only on one project, such a report would probably be enough:
However, if many projects need a watchful pair of eyes, squeezing many burn down charts into one screen will not make the job any easier. Imagine how hard it would be to make sense of those charts arranged in a grid-like fashion. A project manager will likely want to see how projects correlate with each other, as it might be that the timing in one project affects the other projects. In this case, it would be sensible to drift away from the prescribed tool set of Scrum and venture into the unknown land, mixing sense of time (Scrum) with a visual representation (Kanban). That’s how this mix might look as a timeline view for 2 projects:
Such a visualization would fit a dozen projects into one screen, showing a project manager how all of them correlate with each other. Plus, a timeline might have something more in store than merely registering the projects’ health in terms of time. Unlike in the burn down chart, we are able to zoom in on any work item in any project and see what’s going on. This timeline bears a certain resemblance to Kanban board, because bugs, user stories and features are presented as cards stretched over time. At the same time, as in Scrum, the forecast will update depending on velocity (if one needs it done that way), and the timeline will show the latest status. If a project manager is in charge of several teams, that work on several projects, the timeline below will show when one can expect these projects to be completed:
A yet another snapshot of tracking progress with timelines. Here we have Features and User Stories (as in Scrum):
If someone pledges allegiance to Scrum, timelines offer a way to track progress with many iterations. Same for many releases, as opposed to clicking through the single release & iteration plans one by one.
As we can see, it pays off when we forget about practices prescribed by a methodology. A methodology is nothing, unless it works for our purposes, and helps us do the work better and faster. These timelines can not be, scholastically, classified as belonging solely to Scrum as a method, or to Kanban. While classical Scrum only offers burn down charts for progress tracking, this is not enough when people work with many projects and want to keep their hand on the pulse of all of them. Classical Kanban, in its turn, allows no time tracking as a methodology (and as a visual board). I’m not even sure if what they call “Scrumban” would accommodate this representation with timelines. Frankly, I don’t care how it’s called. I only care if the representation works for project managers, leads, stakeholders, product owners, or any other folks in charge of projects, and helps them do their work well. And, I wish we were more of a freethinkers, unpinning ourselves from the methodology labels, no strings attached, sticking only to common sense and the convenience of work.
Related:
Timeline: A Sequence of Decisions
This story is based on an earlier article.
