How to give management the transparency about what teams are working on?

[oscar albrecht]

I am setting up Jira in my current employer. We have already some teams working with it and using Scrum as their development framework.

Now, the management told me they would like to know on what the teams are working and if they are delivering "on time". 

I imagine that this is a recurring problem on agile: how to achieve transparency to the company regarding on what the teams have already worked on and are currently working on?

The management told they wanted something like a Gantt chart, so they could see what the teams have done so far and what they are doing, so they can compare to our roadmap.

I tried to use BigGantt, but it has some problems when a task has already started in a previous sprint, because the sprint start date is set as the earliest task start date.

How can I fix this problem in our projects?

[Dave Rosenlund]

For whatever it may be worth...   I see lots of Jira users that need to have "the best of both worlds" — I.e., Thomas is not alone (not by a long shot).  

Teams demand the flexibility to work in any agile frame work they wish; and management wants visibility into sprint content and planned delivery dates. So, some sort of hybrid approach is needed where dev teams continue working in Jira in an agile framework of their choosing, and project (program, portfolio) managers have a convenient way to reflect what those teams are planning to deliver on a up-to-date timeline.  

At least, this is how we see it at ALM Works. Structure.Gantt is our attempt to offer an "agile Gantt solution."

I imagine Software Plant, and others, understand this need and are trying to deliver a hybrid solution as well. Unfortunately, @Thomas Schlegel, you may have to evaluate more than one Gantt app to discover which of them, if any, will meet your needs.

If you'd like to arrange a Structure.Gantt demo drop us a note via gantt@almworks.com.

-Dave [ALM Works]

[oscar albrecht]

Hi Dave,

Do you have support to Jira hosted in the Cloud?

Thanks!

[Dave Rosenlund]

Hi, Oscar. Not yet. 

Structure, the foundation upon which Structure.Gantt runs, will be available for Jira Cloud soon. You can lean more by joining the Structure Cloud early access program via alm.works/ceap.

Structure.Gantt will follow hopefully sometime in 2019. 

Meanwhile, both are available now for Jira sever and data center. 

-dave [ALM Works]

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi @Dave Rosenlund, maybe your solution delivers the best of both worlds. I haven’t tried it yet, we don‘t have the need for a Gantt app. 

[Dave Rosenlund]

My apologies, Thomas.  I meant to address my @ comment to Oscar. Sorry about that.  :)

[Thomas Schlegel]

@Dave Rosenlund :-) - No problem at all - so I've been involved again - maybe sometimes we also need a Gantt app - then I'll come back to you

[Dave Rosenlund]

@oscar albrechtand anyone who may be watching this thread.

Update: Structure Cloud v1 has been released and it is now available on the Atlassian Marketplace.  

-dave [ALM Works]

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi @oscar albrecht,

in my opinion, Gantt and SCRUM are like fire and ice. They do not fit. I can understand, that management wants to have a release date, but if you work with SCRUM, there should be a product owner and a SCRUM master who are planning the sprints and releases with the team. The product owner should take care of the backlog and releases and is reporting to the management. 

I know, this is not what you wanted to hear, but so is SCRUM in my opinion.

You can give sprint reports to the management, there they can see, which issues were done (and planned) in a particular sprint. Maybe that will fit their needs.

[Oscar Albrecht]

Hi @Thomas Schlegel

Thanks for your answer. I completely agree with you that they do not match.

The Gantt in this case is not going to be used as usually. It will be merely a tool for the management to check what the teams are currently working on and what they have done in the past. Never the future.

The Gantt chart will show only the current sprint, at maximum the next one so the manager can check the plans of each team.

This is uncommon, I know.

But the context is that we have very small teams and therefore  the POs are currently developers. So we want to avoid creating meetings and interruptions for our POs.

A second point is that our managers are "visual" people, so they prefer to see than to hear. So I would like to address their need of transparency with something visual.

As I said, the Gantt is just a tool, it could be substituted by a board or something like this.

Did you have ever had the challenge to maintain some visual tool to keep your managers up to date with your teams current progress without interrupting the PO?