Agile at Work: Understanding Agile Reporting

With agile reports, project managers can use them to read between the lines and find telling information that might lead to uncovering mysteries going on within the project. These reports can reveal some unknown truths, such as Gantt charts displaying data informing the manager a milestone will be missed. Separate these reports act as one small point of interest and is not really used to tell the entire story. Used together, we can look at all reports together and understand a larger point being told. Many of these reports can relay the same thing, some could be older data that is not important, others can just be confusing or not even finished.

A team’s transparency communicates larger truths via the use of simple images. Anyone with knowledge of Agile methodology should be able to casually see the report and understand how well the project and team is performing. Usually, teams only highlight their successes, and it becomes ever so difficult to be transparent when it comes to project or team problems. These problems may not even show if the team is on off track with the schedule or unable to finish work. These charts help the organization understand if the team is being to positive about their outcomes and the product owner can step back and prioritize and eliminate unnecessary work.

Foundations of trust between the team and the owner are established through transparency and each Agile report should share two traits; simplicity and visibility. This open availability gives those who participate a good medium to get good loops of feedback between customer and team. The most common chart used by the team is called the burndown chart which consists of a simple line graph showing if the project is able to deliver properly and are displayed in the shared workspace. Burndown charts can be used for each sprint or for the entire release of the project.

Another popular team report is called the task board which acts as a simple display of  information that holds user stories and tasks on a board or wall space. Those outside of Agile can easily understand the project and visualize how work is progressing, with any type of manager able to track a team’s status. Some red flags could be too much information in the do column, especially if this column is full on the last day of the sprint. A product backlog is the most important report for an agile team, and this acts as a simplified list of value ranked user stories. Product owners are able to use this backlog in meetings to show how much an owner prioritizes certain work and is displayed from top to bottom. But in the end, teams must understand that the most important aspects of these Agile reports should be simplicity, visibility, openness, and transparency, giving a better picture of the entire project to all who care to observe.

Works Cited

"Communicating Progress." *Lynda.com - from LinkedIn*, www.lynda.com/Business-Skills- tutorials/Communicating-progress/175962/452758-4.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2017.

"Keeping Agile Transparent." *Lynda.com - from LinkedIn*, www.lynda.com/Business-Skills- tutorials/Keeping-agile-transparent/175962/452757-4.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2017.

Image link: https://www.inflectra.com/Ideas/Images/task-board.png

Image link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Burn\_down\_chart.png