Beyond Burn Down

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  Agile   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Project managers can report progress on agile projects using metrics that may appeal to stakeholders steeped in more traditional practices. Two approaches gaining appeal are agile earned value management and iteration status reports.

A burn-down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do vs. time. And in the world of agile software development, it is the primary metric that everyone on the development team uses to gauge progress toward completing an iteration.

But what about for others who may not live in that agile world? What about all those stakeholders you communicate with as the project manager? How can you share a sense of project progress with them?

Nancy Nee has an answer or two. As the executive director of project management and business analysis programs at ESI Internationalin Arlington, Va., Nee gave a highly rated speech at the 2010 PMI Global Congress suggesting that project managers can adapt data from the familiar burn-down chart and apply it differently to provide meaningful measurements to a broader audience. In particular, she suggests that putting an agile twist on tried-and-true earned value management calculations can reveal progress and creating an iteration status chart can track shifting priorities.

“The notion of agile in the project environment isn’t new,” says Nee, who holds PMP and CBAP designations. “A lot of …

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