This post is meant for practicing project managers who are transitioning from traditional “earned-value-analysis” based project tracking, to an Agile Scrum based project tracking. It could also be vice-versa. I personally had to undergo this transition in the reverse order, as I moved from Nokia, where Agile Methodologies were well in practice, to Accenture, which was more traditional waterfall-model based. Note that I dont have very strong opinions on which is better – although most of the software industry is (or has) moved on to Agile, traditional “Earned Value” based tracking also has it’s benefits. The focus of this post is to try to put the two methods together, and make sense out of it. There could be cases where a team is following scrum, but the project manager needs to report to management in a more traditional format.
Let’s take a hypothetical project, where a team of 10 people have to implement the following feature list.
For simplicity, billing rate is kept at $10 per month, per resource.
Feature List
|
Dollar Value
|
Effort
(Person Months)
|
| Feature-1 | 100 | 10 |
| Feature-2 | 50 | 5 |
| Feature-3 | 100 | 10 |
| Feature-4 | 25 | 2.5 |
| Feature-5 | 25 | 2.5 |
| Totals | 300 | 30 |
