{"id":15,"date":"2011-07-01T18:35:38","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T16:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proessler.wordpress.com\/?p=15"},"modified":"2011-07-01T18:35:38","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T16:35:38","slug":"a-burndown-chart-is-much-more-than-traffic-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/a-burndown-chart-is-much-more-than-traffic-lights\/","title":{"rendered":"A Burndown Chart is much more than Traffic Lights"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is a wonderful example of me being a project manager struggling to become an agile coach:
\nAs a project manager I loved to show the status of a project via traffic lights<\/strong> (see image below). I always pinned those traffic lights on the team board and every developer could move his or her name sign anytime on red, yellow or green, depending on the developer’s opinion.<\/p>\n

\"traffic<\/p>\n

Traffic lights are easy to understand for everyone (also for externals like management or other teams). Additionally I could quickly react and adjust the plan with the developers if most name signs were on “yellow” or “red”.<\/p>\n

At the moment I work with a small Scrum team (2 developers and 1 UX), our Sprints are 3 weeks. So we actually require a Burndown Chart to show the teams progress.<\/p>\n

At the beginning I suggested to use traffic lights instead of a Burndown Chart to show the team’s progress.<\/strong>\u00a0Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the team is small, we do not have a lot of stories for the Sprint; only 2 to 3 per Sprint. I felt it was not very motivating to have a burndown chart that changes only 2 or 3 times during the Sprint (see below). Furthermore the developers used Scrum for the first time in a project and were rather skeptical about giving a commitment. (Due to bad experiences about effort in man-days\u00a0commitments\u00a0in the past.)<\/p>\n

\"burndownNow there are no more traffic lights on the board.\u00a0Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A much better agile coach than I am<\/em> worked intensively with the team in the last week. He cleaned up. \ud83d\ude09 When I asked him where the traffic lights were, he answered: “The team commits on the Sprint goal \u00a0and not on traffic lights.”<\/p>\n

Of course, he is right. Although he understood my idea of a “Burndown Chart Substitute”, traffic lights only have a “binary” explanatory power: “Yes” – “No” (and maybe “Maybe”).<\/p>\n

A Burndown Chart is much more than traffic lights. <\/strong>
\nIt has the\u00a0\u00a0“binary” explanatory power of the traffic lights.
\nPLUS: It shows the progress of the team (no matter if there are a lot or just some stories), it visualizes the time (remaining & past days of the sprint) and it shows the amount of work still to be done (based on facts not opinion!).<\/p>\n

The much better agile coach than I am<\/em> missed to replace the traffic lights with a burndown chart. This will be my first ToDo on Monday. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is a wonderful example of me being a project manager struggling to become an agile coach: As a project manager I loved to show the status of a project via traffic lights (see image below). I always pinned those traffic lights on the team board and every developer could move his or her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[24,83],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scrum","category-scrumban","tag-burndown-chart","tag-traffic-lights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}