A big advantage of the perfect world of strong, deterministic, complete, overwhelming and unchangable project scopes is that you can track your progress on a micro percent basis, two post commas included. All glory to the waters falling from beginning to end!
Suddenly everything is different in the real world where we live such wondrous things like Scrum.
I was asked by a senior project reviewer how I do track the progress of my projects. He was wondering about missing work breakdown structures with assigned resources and working hour efforts - none of that was in my pro forma MS Project plan.
I told him about story point estimated, feature story based release planning and burndowns. "OK, but..."
I told him about iteration planning, task breakdowns of stories, task estimates in hours, daily scrums, daily progress, daily tracking, daily burndowns, daily knowing-what-happened-what-will-happen-and-what-the-issues-are. His eyes got wide and he said "wow, I'm really impressed of such direct, short-term feedback cycles. Let's give it a try. I'm curious about the results of the next weeks."
Satisfied we left the meeting and yet another time I thought how easily critical people get persuated simply by explaining the details of what we're doing on a daily basis.
Praise the Daily Day!
Very nice example.
ReplyDeleteI'm always looking for ways to talk to the skeptics so that they see the truth instead of the myths. This is a great one to keep around.