Where and how to log the efforts - for ceremonies ( planning, review, retrospective)

[Dipak Naokar]

Hi all,

It is very clear that we have these 3 ceremonies ( "planning" , "review" and "retrospective")  . Planning takes place before we hit the "start sprint" button in JIRA.  This is a significant effort an should be accounted. Even the stakeholders in this meeting are in addition to the DEV team (Example program manager , product owner, Skills / Experts or tech leads - those are not part of DEV team).

Example a team of 9  Techies + Scrum master + PO spend 4 hours in the planning event. Means total 44  (  11 member multiplied by 4 ) hours have been invested for planning. 

Similarly at the end of the sprint - we have "review" and "retrospective".

While the sprint is active , the technical team (Coder, QA, DBA, designer) can log their "actual efforts"  in the respective issue #.

My question is , where do we account for the efforts spent in these 3 events?

How do we log and track them ?

If we have a scrum master (and he is not actual doer or individual contributor), then where to log his/her efforts? and how to log them ?

[Dipak Naokar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bill Sheboy 

Thanks for the response.

There are two parts

First :  you rightly mentioned is for  billable hours situation (capital versus expense charges). That should reflect in the time-sheets (many companies have it : Example a scrum master might be working 50% on team-A and 50% on team-B, so he has to log hours in 2 distinct project codes in the time-sheet tool). And the director / VP wants to know total efforts invested in project-A or project-B for all stakeholders in each team ( dev team + SM + PO) from the JIRA tool.

Q1. Can you please answer the first query (hours spent by persons , those are not part of the technical team)  ? How can we do this in the JIRA tool ?

Second is from the view point of entire scrum team, illustrated as below for clarity.

Now let us take the same example as above.  team of 9  Techies + Scrum master + PO.

To be more clear , let us assume that scrum master is not a technical person and he does not contribute in the code / test (any technical work).

Let us also assume that the team is not highly matured to make estimates in story points, but they are  more comfortable in doing estimates in terms of "hours / days needed to complete the backlog item" (As they were working for few hours in the waterfall model) 

Hence our capacity is 9 person days (for each working day). Assuming we have sprint duration of 2 weeks (10 days) and the best-case scenario 100% availability of all techies. That means we have 90 person-days capacity. 

On the day-1 of the sprint,  4 hours (calendar) are invested in the planning and then we press the "start sprint"  button (after the team has committed to the sprint backlog) 

In this scenario, we need to log the  actual efforts of all techies during the sprint. I understand that , once the "sprint is started"  techies can log their work against respective stories. 

But the question is for planning efforts:  there is not single story that anybody was assigned (while planning meeting was in progress for the first 4 hours) . So, how these techies will be logging there efforts that have been spent in the planning event .

The objective is to ensure that our burn-down chart (with option for remaining efforts) should reflect the truth). 

While writing the above paragraph, Third question came to my mind. The estimates for the stories (issues) are only covering the technical work. Here my questions and options are as below

Q2. Should we include " few hours of planning" in the estimated hours of each of the story  (issue) ?

Option-1 : and then log the actual hours of planning against each story (issue). So that on the day-1 of the sprint - each techie logs 4 hours to the assigned story in his or her name. Plus actual hours spent in the technical work that he/she has done?

Option-2  : For the available capacity purpose, we assume few hours less on day-1 (planning event). That is only 4 hours for each person is  the available capacity. Means my team capacity on Day-1 is 4.5 person-day ( half multiplied by 9). In the same way, I estimate total of half will be required for review and retrospective (putting together) on  last day of the sprint. (my capacity on last working day is 4.5 person-days).

And the capacity for entire sprint is 81 person-days (instead of 90) 

Q3. Whether  my option-1 is correct? OR

Q4, My option-2 is correct? 

Q5.   How it is (logging the efforts spent on planning, review and retrospective) done in other companies (those are matured in the scrum implementation) ?

Q6. Can we create 3 tasks in the sprint (not linked with any story) for the planning, review and retrospective. Then log the actual  efforts of all members against each task ? 

Best Regards,

Dipak

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Dipak Naokar 

Thanks for the additional info; that is a lot of questions related to time-tracking!  Let's try to break this down into 2 ideas, which may help you decide what you actually need to track.

First, what do your project management office (PMO) or Controller say about time tracking and agile efforts?

• They may only care what the features/projects cost to build, and so would consider all supporting work "cap"...in which case you can just count fully-loaded, team day cost and ignore JIRA data.

Second, what kind of work does the team do: new development only, or also production support?

• In this case, you may need to track the prod support time and just subtract that from the full-loaded team costs to find "cap" versus "expense".

If you still want to track hours, there are time tracking features (and marketplace options) that you can find in the JIRA documentation.  You may find that spending too much effort on tracking the hours becomes an expense all by itself.

Best regards,

Bill

[Dipak Naokar]

@Bill Sheboy 

Thanks for the quick answer.

I do like and agree with the following statement.

"   You may find that spending too much effort on tracking the hours becomes an expense all by itself. " ?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Dipak Naokar 

To help the members of the community answer your questions, would you please explain what problem you are trying to solve by tracking the effort agile events?  For example, is this a billable hours situation (capital versus expense charges)?

Best regards,

Bill