Agile reporting supports decision-making, helps to achieve outcomes that create customer value, and offers the ability to track work progress in real-time.
While data indicates that performance rates vary only slightly among different project management approaches, a PMI study reveals that agile practitioners report the highest project success rate - 75.4%. To understand how organizations achieve such success, we will explore the key charts and tools used in agile reporting.
Agile reporting involves the strategic use of specific metrics and tools to analyze and guide decision-making in work management. This reporting method aims to optimize quality and accelerate the delivery of value - both critical pillars of Agile project management. Agile project managers employ various metrics to monitor progress, boost productivity, and ensure that projects remain aligned with the strategic objectives.
Agile teams use metrics such as lead and cycle time, work in progress, velocity, throughput, success rate, delivery on time, and defects to enhance visibility, measure efficiency, and track performance over time. The choice of these metrics and the reporting method depend on the work methodology adopted by the team.
Agile reporting supports decision-making, helps achieve outcomes that create customer value, and offers the ability to track progress in real-time. Here are the three critical aspects of Agile reports.
The underlying difference between reporting in traditional and Agile project management lies in the goals, metrics, and constraints of the two approaches.
The Agile philosophy seeks outcomes. It shifts the work ethic toward finding ways to improve customer satisfaction by delivering greater value as a team. The traditional way of work management, however, emphasizes output and helps to answer how people on the team have performed on an individual level.
Traditional leaders often measure a team’s success based on how well a delivery fits in with the budget and time constraints. This approach can be very limiting when discussing outcomes such as creating real value and increasing customer satisfaction. Therefore, reporting in Agile aims to “zoom out” and identify how a team operates as a whole, how efficient the current process is, and how to improve.
The traditional preferred set of metrics for project reporting provides a narrower view of a project’s success. Decision-making is then based purely on specific indicators and their numeric values. In contrast, Agile project managers take into account various factors such as context, actual customers’ problem resolution, process roadblocks, or delivery over time.
To make the most of your reports, the right tools are your best ally. Today’s market offers a generous choice of tools to help you get real-time reports and draw insights into your work process, team performance, or another indicator of success. Here are seven helpful charts you can start exploring.
Scrum teams apply this chart, which helps managers track the number of user stories completed for a given iteration (sprint). The report allows them to predict how many sprints are needed to complete specific pieces of work, such as epics, projects, or themes.
Burndown chart
Velocity is an important Agile metric used by Scrum development teams. It represents the average amount of work items that can be completed during a single iteration (sprint). Scrum teams use story points or hours to measure the necessary effort of a user story. Furthermore, tracking velocity in Agile is facilitated by the velocity chart that shows how many story points have been completed in the span of several sprints.
The chart visualizes the total number of work items in every work phase of your process. The dynamics of the different colored bands on the Cumulative Flow Diagram will help you understand how long it takes to complete a work item (average cycle time), if work assignments enter the workflow at the same pace as they leave it (throughput), or how much work is progressing at each work phase (work in progress). Monitoring and analyzing the diagram can help you gain valuable insights on how to stabilize your work process.
Cumulative Flow Diagram
A pillar of efficient reporting in Agile project management is understanding how long it takes to complete a given piece of work. The invaluable chart visualizes all the work assignments a team has completed over a specific period. Furthermore, the insights provided by the Cycle Time Scatterplot allow project managers to make informed decisions based on historical data about work delivery in the future.
Cycle Time Scatterplot
Throughput is one of the fundamental Agile metrics and represents the number of work items passing through a work process over a specific period. Agile project leaders use the chart to understand the real workload capacity of their team and plan better the amount of work that they can deliver for a given time period. A good practice is measuring a team’s throughput rate on a weekly basis.
Throughput Run Chart
Another fundamental reporting mechanism for Agile teams following the Kanban method is the work-in-progress metric. Tools such as the Aging WIP chart (part of some professional Kanban software) facilitate the monitoring of how work assignments move through the work phases of a process. This helps project leaders understand where work is slowing down, delve into the reasons, and improve upon them. Comparing how teams have performed in similar scenarios in the past can lead to new teams or strategic improvement initiatives.
To understand better the efficiency of a work process, Lean project managers use the ratio between the value-adding time (actively working on completing the task) and the lead time (the entire time that is required for an assignment to be completed) of a work item. The difference between the two is considered waste and should be reduced. The Flow Efficiency chart, part of some professional Kanban solutions, allows managers to analyze that waste in the work process and improve the team’s efficiency.
Flow Efficiency chart
To make efficient reporting, define the goals of your reports, ensure that the intended users can easily understand them, and use them to improve over time.