Agile Meets PMI with "Agile Earned Value" Metrics

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Oct 08, 2007 08:27 PM

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Agile

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Agile in the Enterprise

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Management,

Scaling Agile,

Planning,

Value & Metrics

When Agile escapes the pilot project, into the wilds of a traditional, PMI-style organisation... what's a PMO to do? How can teams report on progress in a way that makes sense to outsiders, when dates are always achieved, but scope is always soft? A prevalent, traditional project management practice is to measure actuals vs. a baseline plan for cost, schedule and scope using Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, but this set of metrics no longer makes no sense for Agile teams, which practice adaptive planning. Tamara Sulaiman of SolutionsIQ, a west-coast services company, has written an article for InfoQ about AgileEVM, which adapts the traditional method to easily fit within the Scrum project management framework.

Sulaiman maintains that AgileEVM can be used in conjunction with traditional EVM metrics across the entire product life cycle to measure cost efficiencies. This would provide an important addition to an Agile program management structure - giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle, and across a portfolio containing both traditional and Agile projects.

This article serves as an introduction to her more detailed paper published at Agile2006 (co-written with Brent Barton and Thomas Blackburn, also of SolutionsIQ), which includes the detailed mathematics and further examples.

Read the InfoQ article: AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle, which includes a sample management metrics dashboard from a real client project.

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   Is she related to Hani?

   Oct 8, 2007 9:27 PM by zqu dlyba

   Anyone know if she's related to Hani Suleiman?

   Reply

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   Re: Is she related to Hani?

   Oct 9, 2007 6:52 AM by Deborah Hartmann

   Different spelling... I made that mistake while editing and had to fix it :-)

   Reply

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   Sounds complicated

   Oct 15, 2007 11:37 PM by Vikas Hazrati

   This sounds complicated to me! We have been using Scrum and big visible charts all over the place however I am not sure how much value would EVM add to the existing way we work? Most of the time we are looking at the burndown chart, velocity chart, plenty of Maven reports and that is it. Have we already tried this on a project and see how it works? To me for now it looks like a lot of work with little benefit for the team working on the project. It seems to get a lot into costing and not sure if the team should be looking into that. The Scrum Master may be but mostly it should just be the product owner i guess. Thoughts?

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   Any ideas about how to estimate the release budget?

   Oct 16, 2007 9:35 AM by Juan Marquez

   I wonder if there is any ideas about how to estimate the budget for a scrum development.

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   Re: Any ideas about how to estimate the release budget?

   Nov 4, 2007 1:44 AM by Okke Harsta

   Mike Cohn has done an excellent job at describing budget estimations in his book 'Agile Estimating and Planning'. I have used his techniques on several scrum projects with success.

   Reply

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   Re: Sounds complicated

   Nov 27, 2007 9:44 AM by James Brown

   Vikas, EVM is a requirement on most all US government contracts and must be reported. While I agree that the scrum team in general may not get a huge amount of benefit, it is usually a contractual agreement. The Scrum team is more worried about being "done, done" at the end of the sprints which would in the end provide them with a SPI of 1 or greater (if they finished early). From a CPI point of view, it would depend upon the resources used during the sprint (more or less than planned to get the work done). But in the end, I believe that the ScrumMaster and Product Owner team will get more from EVM than the Scrum team itself.

   Reply

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