What does the first row 'Points Planned' on the Program Allocation Report represent?

Question

When I look at the first row 'Points Planned' on the Program Allocation Report I see a line of colored fields that have data similar to the second line 'Points Accepted'. This second line corresponds to the accepted data in my Jira velocity chart.

Where does the first line come from?  Where can I find out more about it?

Also: Can I add a third row of 'points committed'? Can I manually change any of this data somewhere?

Also: The pics I see of the program allocation report show 'Loaded"  and 'Actual'. How do I get to that report?

Jay Michael · Answer

@Tina Behers  Thank you. That's what I am hoping to go for. The challenge is that when they do their PI planning, all the top brass are there and the PO makes all sorts of commitments and the top brass don't understand what's going on in the team.

If I can show them that in the past 6 sprints they planned something, committed something else and took in a completely different number, it will be visible to everyone and their mother-in-law the way things come down at the team level. That's what I was hoping Jira align can help highlight on the program allocation report.

Will check out the scope change report. Thanks for taking the time to walk me through this.

Tina Behers_cd5uzj · Answer

@Jay Michael The scope change report will provide that detail.

However.. yes the human coach in me is coming out now... ;)

If this is a common practice for the team to have to pull, drop shift during sprints, consider raising their buffer.

For example:

Known average velocity is 47 points.  Nearly every agile framework and method out there tells us to reserve 10% of average velocity. In this team's case, based on your description, I would recommend that they reserve 8 points, plan only 39.  Then they have velocity IF something gets added, and IF it does not, they can always pull the next 8 points work of stories from the prioritized backlog.

This method will serve a few dragons

1) the team will feel less "here we go again" defeated as they have to replan their sprints all the time

2) it provides the mechanisms to truly commit the delivery

3) it sets expectations with the stakeholders and hopefully will get them to a better planning state (happens more than you think)

Jay Michael · Answer

@Tina Behers  I was afraid of that. One of my teams keeps committing 47 story points which is their avg. velocity and they keep getting asked to pull in stories during the sprint. So while they remove stories during the sprint its not an even in and out. I was hoping Jira align would give them the visibility to how many story points they are adding on avg. so that they can start adjusting the inputs appropriately.

Doing this in the program allocation chart will give that visibility at the program level.