Dashboard Analysis

The monitoring tools described in Process Control for Application Development and Monitoring for Service Management are used to create Dashboards that are stored in the organization's BI application and are updated with new data on a regular basis. These dashboards are used to keep track of progress and to identify bottlenecks.

The following illustrates an example of a dashboard for Application Development:

It includes the Velocity chart and Burn-Down chart (as described in Sprint Velocity and Sprint Burn-Down) as well as a table that lists the Sprint Backlogs, a Team Completion pie chart (who accomplished how many tasks) and a Team Contribution pie chart (who is participating how much in helping other through comments, reviews, etc).

For this example, the dashboard could be reviewed during a Sprint Review session (among other use cases). A typical scenario would be that the team notices during the review that the target of the previous Sprint could not be achieved as the Burn-Down chart shows that there are many remaining tasks left. Then, they take a look at the Team Completion chart and notice that a person in the team did not accomplish as many tasks as usual. In talking to the person, he shares that he was struggling with the tasks that were assigned to him because he never did this type of task before and no one helped him, which is also reflected in the Team Contribution chart. So in planning the next Sprint, the team can take the new insights into consideration by e.g. assigning this type of task to another person who has experience or planning training sessions where a person with experience teaches the person who has difficulty with these tasks.

This example is only one of many possible scenarios in which dashboards are used to improve processes. Through the visualizations it is easier to extract insight from the data and by displaying several visualizations in one compact form one can get a good overview and identify related processes. As situations and processes differ and change over time, different dashboards can be created that make use of different data and visualizations appropriate for the given context. The most important thing is that regular events are set in place in which these dashboards get reviewed and analyzed, such as during Sprint Review according to the SCRUM Framework or during Monitoring or Evaluation phase as described in the Service Lifecycle.