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PowerBI Help (Mimecast version)

PowerBI Help (Mimecast version)

Owned by Bazil Arden (Unlicensed)
Apr 29, 2020
6 min read

These charts are designed to help each squad to be more aware of their work, identify improvements and create more accurate predictions. 



Charts like this won't give you answers, but they should help you ask better questions! 



 

 

 

BurnUp / 'Landing Zone'

Purpose: Show the likely range of dates that a piece of work is likely to finish. 

Primary audience: Stakeholders and team

Uses:

  • Can be used for a squad but more likely for a fix Version or Epic

  • Adjust assumptions about scope and throughput rate to see how this might effect the dates

  • Review history to see if throughput or scope have had any expected changes 

Settings:

  1. Toggle between count of Issues or Points (in the right hand panel) 

  2. Select the date range - either manually or with the slider

  3. Adjust the rate at which the scope line is flattened out.  

    1. The projected scope is based on the historical rate of scope growth.  Higher numbers will flatten out the projected scope. e.g.  a number of 3 means that each day into the future the rate of scope growth will be decreased by 3% 

  4. Adjust projected completion rate.  This shows the range of completion rates,  based on historical completion rate. 

  5. The manual forecast enables you to adjust the throughput rate.  You might use this if there is not yet any history for the fix version / epic.

    1. Use the number in (7) to decide what is a good manual rate to use

  6. Choose how many recent weeks you want to use to calculate the recent average throughput rate 

  7. This is the average throughput rate for the last 3 weeks (which is set in the slider above) 

  8. Use the slicers to select Team,  Fix Version or Epic

  9. Decide on which states make up your squad's 'Definition of Done' state 

Epic Progress

Purpose: Show relative size and progress of the Epics . 

Primary audience: Stakeholders 

Uses:

  • Communicate progress and priorities at a level that most stakeholders are going to be able to engage with

    • Story-level is probably too low granularity for most people outside of the team

  • See if team focus is scattered across too many Epics - possibly reduce WIP

Settings:

  1. Shows proportion of the backlog that is un-estimated issues

  2. order by either

    1. Rank: The Rank (priority) in the backlog

    2. % Complete 

    3. Size

  3. Slice by any of these criteria 

Completed work / day (by issue type)

Purpose: See the mix of work being done by a squad or Swimlane - showing Issue Type 

Primary audience:  Stakeholders and Product Owners

Uses:

  • Review if it is the optimal balance of work being done

  • Decide if adjustments need to be made in the prioritisation of work coming to the squad

Settings:

  1. Change the date range (or use the slider) to select dates that issues were closed

  2. Slice by project or team



Completed work by Type

Purpose: To see proportion of work done by team across the 8 types of work 

Primary audience: Stakeholders

Uses:

  • Review trends to see if proportion of time spent on different kinds of work is 'optimal' 

  • Identify trends in the relative proportion of work

  • Communicate with stakeholders the time spent on product and non-product work

  • Choose whether to aggregate the data from either Epic or Story level

    • Some swimlanes record work type at the story/bug level, others at Epic level 

Settings:

  1. Y-axis shows either count or story points of the completed items

  2. Select the types of work to be shown (best to exclude blanks)

  3. Can toggle between a monthly or daily view of completed work



 

You can drill down (or up) by right mouse clicking on the month or year bar



Control chart (Scatter plot) 

Purpose: Use to identify outliers and trends in cycle times 

Primary audience: The squad / team

Uses:

  • Useful input to retrospectives to review the trends and patterns

  • Identify outlier stories and see if there is a pattern or underlying cause 

Settings:

  1. Shows the median for this data set 

    1. This can be compared over time to see if trends are changing

    2. Note: we are looking to add trends, but this cannot be done with 'native' PowerBI

  2. Choose date range (

    1. Power BI doesn't enable us to show dates on the X-axis, and so we have had to use number of days in the past, from today. 

  3. You can filter out the big outliers, as this can flatten the chart for the majority of stories ( logarithmic scales not yet available in PowerBI)

    1. Caution: your choice of Max cycle time will reduce the dataset and therefore change the Median time and 85th percentile

 

Cycle time Histogram

Purpose: Predict how long it will take to finish a new story. 

Primary audience: Squad, Delivery managers

Uses:

  • Identify outliers (very long cycle time) and investigate root causes

  • See what the 85% is (not yet on this chart -coming in later version, may need non-PowerBI functionality) 

    • Can then say that the squad is able to turn around 85% of work within x days.  This can be compared over time

  • See how predictable the squad is.  Tighter spread of columns indicates more predictable

Settings:

  1. Shows the number of stories that took x days (cycle time) to get across the state(s) selected in 2

  2. Select what you want to measure cycle time across

    1. e.g.  how much time stories spent in development

  3. You can see one more more issue types

  4. Decide if you want to remove outliers

  5. Select data range 

 

Item Aging 

Purpose: Identify work that has become stuck or forgotten whilst in the selected state e.g.  In progress or 'ready for deployment' 

Primary audience: Squad and Delivery manager

Uses:

  • Identify work that needs to be resolved (either done or discarded) 

  • Y axis 

Settings:

  1. Shows the number of days item has been in each of the 'In Progress states'

  2. Refine items by team or other criteria

  3. These are the states that will be shown in the bar chart.  i.e.  the time spent in each of these states is shown

  4. Choose the current state of the items - this example will only show the items that are currently in the state of 'In Progress' 



Unplanned work trends

Purpose: Show the quality trends - number

Primary audience: Squad and stakeholders

Uses:

  • Identify quality trends as shown by the bugs/ESUPs being found and closed. 

  • Other quality trends e.g code quality, are available from tools like Sonarqube

Settings:

  1. Decide whether to see bugs or ESUPs or both 

  2. Show either daily,  weekly or monthly 



Right mouse click to be able to 'Drill up' or down to see the quarterly values