VIDEO: Project Management Tutorial: Dashboards

Hey TechnologyAdvice viewers, thanks for joining me. Today we’re going to be talking about what you should look for in an agile PM dashboard. SO that’s a long series of words and basically what we mean is a central module where you can house all of your different analytics and reports within your pm software. So we know dashboards are great for getting quick overviews of different types of info for different types of products. There great for sharing information with executive’s product owners or other stakeholders.

So what should you look for? The first thing you should look for are burn down charts and burn up charts. Burn down chart, pretty classic agile fare, they have an XY axis with x representing time and y representing work. There are two descending lines, one is estimated work which will stay constant and the other is work that you have left which will fluctuate and depending whether it’s above or below the estimated work line will show whether you’re behind on a project or pacing.

Burn up charts, a little bit of a different concept. Again XY axis two lines except this time there ascending and instead of estimated work you’ll have project scope and work you’ve completed. So burn up charts are really nice for telling why projects are either falling behind. So are you falling behind because the work isn’t getting accomplished fast enough or because the scope keeps changing because of different projects? So burn down burn up charts very nice to look at on an individual project basis.

Then we have velocity, the other two are charts. Velocity is a numerical measure, the way you’re pacing through a specifics sprint, it’s the sum of different points you accrue from completing users stories and that compared against an average of points you have from the past three sprints. It’s a relative metric because it assumes user stories will remain the same points throughout sprints. It may not always be the most accurate but it is nice from a relative standpoint.

It’s a pretty good measurement. So burn down charts, burn up charts, velocity, those are good at looking at individual projects. If you want to look at all your projects you’re going to need a project snapshot. Now project snapshots are often showed as pie charts that represent different projects. It’s not ideal. I just like it when they’re simple line graphs that show percent complete that are on an XY axis relative to milestones or whether its just on a column that has a percentage complete and a row next to the project.

I think those are much better than pie charts. SO project snapshots are really really great for getting big views of your portfolio. These are the ones you will probably use a lot to convey different information to different stakeholders. Finally we have time tracking. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Just make sure it’s there. What you’re going to want to look for is per-person tracking. That way you can use the time it takes to compete each user story to calculate your sprints.

Time tracking we know is important for PM because we use it to build other metrics. Again just make sure it’s there you’re going to want it. This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are plenty of other reports you can have in an agile dashboard but these are some basics you should look for. If you see a product that doesn't have these you may want to look for something else. You may want to make sure if it doesn't have these that you can work with that. It’s kind of a basic way to vet a project and make sure it‘ll do what you need to.