Discussion on ‘burn up’ charts and how they can be effectively used by project managers for reporting progress. The discussion takes into account work in progress (wip), outstanding inventory of features and other phases of development. Many good discussion points are presented as well as good observations about reporting project progress.

Very detailed and informative description of how authors planned and ran iterations on one large project.

The test manager has two responsibilities: to report the right information, and to report the information right. Both are equally important. If you don't have the right information, you're not doing your job. If you don't report it so that it's accepted, valued, and acted upon, you might as well not be doing your job. To address both topics, this paper is organized around the situation in which the test manager presents "the public face" of the testing team: the status meeting. It covers the information to be presented and the needs of the people involved (which govern how to present that information usefully).

This article describes some very useful metrics that are probably worth collecting on any project.

This article discusses a graphic that shows the status of larger projects, how to gather the information needed, read the status chart, and when needed, show more detailed breakdown for each subproject.

You are the project manager of a large project and testing is uncovering faults, trouble reports are starting to pile up and the release date is coming soon. Are they going to be fixed on time? What could you do to help? Are there any bottlenecks? Where should you assign more resources? Does this scenario sound familiar? Have you been there? This article will explain how you can answer these questions by using an old method called Line of Balance in a new way.

Phase Containment Effectiveness (PCE) is a project measurement technique that provides timely and accurate predictions of the project’s current state and future risks. PCE methods deliver project insights beyond those provided by the Gantt and Program Evaluation Review Techniques (PERT). PCE provides data that increases the probability of a successful project outcome. This article describes the way in which PCE was implemented at one Motorola business unit.

In Agile projects, it's a common practice to visualize and share project status in “big visible charts” on a wall of the project room. Lean systems also use such devices. "Kanban," in Japanese means, loosely translated, 'card or sign'. In a Lean production system, Kanban is a method which uses standard units or lot sizes with a single card attached to each. A new card is "pulled" into the system only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is completed. In this paper, I explore visualization methods found widely in agile projects these days, and then propose using Kanban Boards to organize three viewpoints (Time, Task, and Team) so that the whole team understands the current status of the project and can work in an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner. Finally, I introduce a software tool “TRICHORD” that implements Kanban Boards to realize project visualization from the three viewpoints.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a well known project management technique which measures the integration of technical performance, cost and schedule against planned performance within a given project. The result is a simple set of metrics providing early warnings of performance issues, allowing for timely and appropriate adjustments. In addition, EVM improves the definition of project scope, and provides valuable metrics for communicating progress to stakeholders. The information generated helps to keep the project team focused on making progress. AgileEVM is a light-weight, and easy to use adaptation of the traditional EVM techniques which provides the benefits of traditional EVM in Agile projects.

Managers can build better, more efficient teams and successfully navigate the toughest project environments in tandem by reading a set of human gauges (indicators) provided by their project team. Reading these gauges requires observation of, and listening to, some rarely utilized aspects of teaming. Once collected, the gauges act as essential leading indicators that provide insight into building stronger teams and arriving at a project destination safely and on time.