Have you earned value today?

There are many ways to track progress on projects - see "Don't burn out - burndown" for example. Burndown is particularly useful in agile projects with timeboxes where the targets are set at quite short notice - month by month for example. Earned Value (EV) analysis on the other hand is a great technique for tracking progress against a stable plan (ultra-agile teams go and read that burndown article instead of this one - stable plans are a luxury you rarely see!).

With EV tracking the value of completing tasks is calculated from its originally planned cost. There are some disadvantages of this - not least that the whole method relies on having the well-estimated plan to start from - however its advantage is that efficiency of execution can be measured day by day on the project.There are two relevant measures of efficiency that EV analysis provide: cost efficiency (how much better or worse you are doing than the baseline plan with regards the cost of the tasks you have delivered so far); and schedule efficiency (how much more or less value you have delivered at this point in time compared to the baseline plan).


xProcess supports EV analysis in the Executive Dashboards client (see screenshot). The Executive Dashboards provide an overview of multiple projects (or just one project if you like) so it's an ideal place to look at these efficiency levels in different projects. We may revisit how to use the views provided in later blog entries so watch this space.

Great resources for estimating

There are two new books on estimating that I've been finding very useful recently, and one older one. The older one first; and here you understand I'm not referring to Larry Putnam Senior himself! It's his book, co-authored with Ware Myers, "Measures for Excelence: Reliable software on time on budget" that remains a classic, full of helpful advice and packed with actual measures from real projects. I met Larry in 1992 just after his book came out, when I was in Washington with Ed Yourdon presenting some research on software reuse from Japan. He kindly gave me a signed copy and it has been in frequent use since that time, and was a key source for my own book "Better Software Faster" published in 2002. Putnam and Myers' latest book "Five Core Metrics" is another excellent resource which highlights the essentials that all software projects should measure, with practical information about how to do it. In case you're wondering the five are:

• Time
• Effort
• Quality
• Productivity
• Size

While Putnam and Myers experience covers projects ranging from the small to the truly massive, using a wide range of methodologies and covering five decades of software projects, Mike Cohn's book "Agile Estimating and Planning" is focused very much on the agile development processes of more recent history. It is similarly an excellent read with a mass of very practical advice for project managers of agile projects. I particularly liked the "Planning Poker" variant of the Wideband Delphi approach (!) but there are many other practical suggestions and insights, including discussions of burndown charts, velocity and prioritisation.

The challenge for me, working as I am on the product direction of xProcess, is to ensure that the full range of techniques and processes represented in these books is well supported by the underlying model and user interface of the product. xProcess has always been about agility, and in particular bringing powerful techniques from established project management methods and making them available to managers and participants of agile projects in such a way that they remain agile. These books similarly contribute to that drive to achieve controlled, productive and agile software projects.

Hierachy Diagrams

Hierarchy diagrams in xProcess are a good way to see an overview of a project or of process patterns. The diagram on the left is a project that is following a Prince2 style project - actually using a process defined by the WPM Group, leading project management consultants and a company I've been doing some work with recently.

The Hierachy Diagram is a good way to show Work Breakdown Structures for projects, and they are also useful editor views, where you can expand/collapse regions of the hierarchy and edit tasks via their right-click menu.

One more thing to try with Hierachy Diagrams... turn on the constraints on the diagram via the filter button and (as in this example) you'll see all the dependencies between the various tasks. Very useful for understanding the constraints imposed on the ordering of tasks.