Agile Project Monitoring Area

Summary

All members of the organization are in charge of monitoring the progress of the project, suggesting corrective actions and making sure they are completed. There is complete transparency and a lot of communication among everyone, thus ensuring that everyone understand the current status of the project.

Goals

- The team monitors the actual progress of the project at timeboxed intervals. It should be measured the actual completion of requirements, risks tackled and discovered, changes in business requirements (i.e. changes in scope), etc.
- The team monitors the progress daily, trying to discover blockers (things that prevent the team from doing progress) and synchronization points (e.g. among dependent requirements)
- The team and business stakeholders agree on corrective actions or adaptions to the plan and execute them.

Standard Practices

- After each iteration, there is a demo that allows the team to show the business side the actual progress made on requirements. There is a great deal of knowledge won in this meeting as the business people get a feeling of the actual product being constructed. This knowledge gained should be reflected in the plan, as the horizon should be clearer after each iteration. The team should have also gained a clearer understanding of what it takes to develop the requirements and the amount of work remaining.
- Daily, the team introspects on the progress (compared to the expect one) and blockers trying to complete all work they have committed to and remove all impediments as fast as possible. In Scrum, this meeting is called "daily scrum" and it is usually the ScrumMaster who is in charge of removing any impediment that might prevent the team from doing progress.
- Each action item detected during either the daily scrum or the review should be completed to end. It is a good practice for one of the team members to be hold accountable.
- Visual Radiators should be hanged in various places of the open space the team works on. One of the tenets of Agile is transparency, and therefore everyone should be as aware as possible of the actual progress.