Avoiding the "watermelon" project status report

?? Does your current role involve keeping an eye on projects delivered by one or more Agile Teams, but you're finding it difficult to know what's actually happening? Do you find projects turning suddenly from "green" to "red" without any warning?

Here's my suggestion: stop accepting status reports based on things like "velocity", "story points", "percentage complete", etc.

Instead:

• Ask work to be described in terms of "customer recognizable items" (Features, Requirements, Change Requests, Incidents, Defects, etc.).
• Request progress to be reported by identifying which items are in your "inventory of promises" (or commitments), your "inventory of work in progress" (WIP), and your "inventory of DONE"
• Also ask to know which items are "blocked", and for how long they have been.
• If you want to get fancier, measure elapsed time between some of the lines in the diagram (cycle times, or lead times), throughput across the green line, and aging in the central portion of the flow.

Tracking these quantities, and keeping an eye on how they change over time will give you a better idea of where your project is standing, and advance warning of trouble ahead.

Leave the watermelon for the summer deck, not the project status meeting ??