In support of Big Visible Charts

If you’re not familiar with the concept of displaying critical project information in a very direct and low tech way, I recommend you do some reading on big visible charts. Ron Jefferies has an excellent write up on this at http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/BigVisibleCharts.htm.  I bring this up because we recently had a reaffirmation the benefit of big visible charts during an iteration review meeting for one of our .Net projects. During the iterations for this project we are tracking the iteration burn down in hours on a large sheet of paper posted in the war room. In this instance, a situation occurred that required us to task out user stories twice during the two week iteration. (We tasked out a week’s worth of stories at the beginning and the middle of the iteration.) As part of the daily stand up meeting, we update the iteration burn down with the hours remaining for all the tasks. This reflects tasks in the back log and tasks in process. It would go up and down as we reassessed the work remaining on tasks in process and, new tasks missed during the task break down, tasks implemented, etc.

The benefit of having this chart was that during the iteration review, when we discussed velocity and ways to increase the velocity, the developers got up and walked over to the burn down and began to discuss the changing slopes; when it dropped the steepest, when we tasked out new stories mid-iteration, when it wasn’t as steep a drop, etc. This conversation lead to two distinct behaviors that we’ll adapt on future iterations, to help maximize the iteration burn down and thus overall velocity. We might have determined to adapt these behaviors without the presence of the iteration burn down, but the amount of effort to create and update the chart is negligible and it provides a direct sight to what’s important to any project, progress. The best thing about it was that the developers had the discussion without any direction from management and determined the behaviors to adapt. This means that the behaviors are easier to implement and follow.

If you're interested in the behaviors we're adapting, email me at: molson@visionpace.com