Project Managers FAQ's on Agile

Project managers adapting Agile have a series of questions about Agile ways of working. This is my attempt to list and answer a few.

Can we measure earned value in Scrum ?

Earned Value (EV) is a metric which answers the question: "What did we get for the money we spent?". We could relate this in scrum as a measure of stories done vs. the original sprint commitment expressed as a percentage.

Using the EV leads to an outcome of success or failure(i.e if >75% team succeeds the sprint, less than that the team fails). This is often misused because if pushed, the team will tend to either under commit or over estimate tasks.

EV can be put to use in a scrum environment if required but we should be careful to not push the team to meet a certain percentage and ensure term "failure"  is never used.

How do I measure project progress?

Project progress is measured using a release burn down chart. A release burn down chart is a graph which visualizes total points remaining for the release at the end of each sprint.

Is there a Work Breakdown Structure(WBS) in Agile
PMBOK definition of WBS is "a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables". WBS is based on all the activities required to be accomplished in the project (e.g., requirements definition document, design specification document).

In Agile all work is organized as end user functionality refereed  to as user stories. Each user story represents work to deliver the increment of functionality and add business value.

During planning, agile development is inclined to a feature breakdown structure (FBS) approach instead of the work breakdown structure (WBS). Feature breakdown structures are advantageous for a few reasons:

- Help with communication between the customer and the development team in terms both can understand.
- Allow customer to prioritize the work to be done based on business value.
- Enable work tracking against the actual business value produced.


There are a lot more question than what I have listed. I will leave this blog here and would would like to hear from readers on the questions your encountered and learn from your experiences.

Please share your experiences and comments.