Standard Progress Reporting & Tracking

A simply way to improve visibility for customers into projects is through reporting and metrics.

Timeline

The first thing that all stakeholders want to know is how does the timeline look. Are we on track? Are there any delays? What is our next milestone? I create a simple timeline in Excel (you can use Visio if you prefer) and color code it to indicate the health of each iteration.

Parking Lot

Provide visibility into the progress of features of the system. Use the same color coding system as the timeline. Each feature has a number of UCs associated with it and you can show the percentage of those UCs that have been delivered to the client.

Productivity
Report the team's productivity after each iteration. Also show the target for the team. I report function points per hour because I want to see the productivity going up.

Resource Burn Rate

Our customers need to know how many resources we have any our burn rate. They have budgets they need to manage too. In this example, I am only reporting past periods, but it could easily be extended to any future timeframe. I build this from the Ramp Plan. I also report the resource count (onshore and offshore) by role.

Burndown & Burnup

Use a burndown chart to track the remaining effort against plan. Use a burnup to track the % complete against plan. I color code the bars to indicate where we went off track. I also add call outs to explain large changes. I report the data in a small table (e.g., planned effort, actual effort remaining, difference).


Testing

There are several reports that you can create to provide visibility into testing. This example represents our defect trend by severity over the course of an iteration.

Attrition Rate
Most of our clients are concerned about turnover and losing key resources. We have introduced the following graphs to track our attrition rate per quarter. We also list the resources that left and the reasons for leaving.

Other Metrics Under Consideration

• Planned vs. actual features delivered by iteration
• Velocity (# of FPs delivered by iteration)
• Defect discovery rate
• Defect density (defects per FP)