Monthly Archives: December 2010

SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes

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Dashboard Spy Topic: SCRUM Basics in Under 10 Minutes: SCRUM is one of the best agile development methodologies being used today.

This video is one of the best introductions I have seen on SCRUM. Take a look:

User representative, SCRUM Master, developers, testers, customers, executives, release planning, sprints are just some of the topics covered in the video.

Here’s an FAQ from the SCRUM video:

QUESTION ANSWER
What do you mean the daily stand-up is not required?
Pay special attention to what I say in the video regarding stand-up meetings…The daily stand-up meeting is an EXCELLENT way to keep communication flowing and can be a key success factor for many teams.

However, the key objective here is that communication needs to flow between team members. In many cases, it already flows incredibly efficiently (I know that’s not the case for most teams).

For example, I have been in teams where the entire team works in a single “war room” scenario, often on the same conference table. In such a scenario, communication is already flowing every minute of the day and a daily stand-up would be seen as a joke – a red-tape, time-wasting event that the guy who went to a scrum class is making us do.

In other cases, I’ve seen distributed teams that use tools such as Yammer to communicate what each person is working on in real-time, making a daily stand-up meeting, something that’s not easily possible in distributed teams, an archaic distraction.

However, in the vast majority of cases, I would recommend sticking with a schedule of daily meetings to sync up where everybody is on the development progress. Don’t use my video as an excuse to omit daily meetings (unless you already have a communication system that’s better than a standup meeting).

I thought sprints were suppose to be exactly 30-days. Why are you saying 3 to 30 days?
Let’s refer back to this rule: nothing should be considered an absolute requirement [except for maybe this rule :) ].

If somebody tells you that “in scrum sprints are always X days”, thank them for their time and walk away. They are selling you a religion, and all you want to do is to ship software efficiently.

The more reasoned approach is to set Sprint durations based on the release-cycle timeframes for a given project.

If your project ships a new version of your web site, iPhone App or windows application every couple of weeks, then how could you have 30-day sprints? You can’t and you shouldn’t!

That’s when 2- or 3-day sprints would make sense.

On the other hand, if you’re working on a well-established product that ships a new version every 18-24 months, having longer sprints of 4-6 weeks might make the most sense.

Do all sprints in a given project have to be exactly the same length?
Of course not! Generally speaking, it would be best to have same-length sprints (something like 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks) so that everybody is on the same page. Everybody knows when a new sprint begins (like every Monday) and when it ends (every Friday). It helps reduce the need for extra communication.

However, if you’re working on a two-year project on 6-week sprint cycles and you’re 8 weeks from shipping, it would make a lot of sense to change your sprint durations to 2 weeks so that you can squeeze in 4 sprints before you ship. Each sprint could focus on a different aspect of the system (stability, finishing touches, bug-fixes, etc.).

Why are you saying it’s good to have a sprint focused on bugs?
Ideally, bugs are dealt with at the time the feature is originally in development, but there is simply no question that in every software project I have ever seen, some bugs will be discovered by testers or users at some time after the feature is considered complete.

You could consider addressing bugs just like any other item in your product backlog. There is nothing wrong with that.

However, if you focus the entire team on just bug-fixes for at least one or two full sprints, you might get better results as the goals of every team member will be the same: fixing bugs!

There is a lot of productivity gain to be had when the entire team is focused on the same goal. Having bug-focused sprints towards the end will generally lead to a more polished, stable product.

Dashboard Design 101

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Dashboard Spy Topic: Dashboard Design

Take a look at the excellent primer on UX Matters titled Dashboard Design 101. Thanks goes to Dashboard Spy reader AJ Kock of The Catalyst Blog for finding this and recommending it to me.

It’s a solid primer on the basics of dashboard design. It starts off with an introduction to business intelligence dashboards and then looks at the topic of analyzing dashboard user requirements:
Dashboard User Requirements

The post does go into the answers for each of these questions, so be sure to hop over and take a look at this solid primer on business dashboard design.

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

11 Elements for HR Dashboards

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Dashboard Spy Topic: KPIs for Human Resources Dashboards. An interesting list of HR Key Performance Indicators comes from this pdf document titled The HR Dashboard: People Fuel Your Company’s Success.

  • Company Leadership
  • Manager Effectiveness
  • Flexibility & Control Over Work
  • Compensation & Benefits
  • Career Advancement
  • Work-Life Support
  • Teamwork & Quality
  • Diversity, Inclusion & Participation
  • Communication
  • Employee Resilience
  • Employee Commitment

A typical listing of Human Capital metrics. The question, of course, is what data sources can you gather and roll up to calculate or derive the above areas? No easy task.

Take a look at the diagram. It shows the first 9 elements rolling up to “Employee Resilience” and “Employee Commitment”.

Human capital metrics

Data Connections

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The data flow diagram is a time-honored project artifact. Here’s a look at possibly the most interesting data flow diagram I’ve ever seen.

Click on the diagram below to see the original post from Diagrams: Everything is connected to everything else.

This just cracks me up. I love how the “Girls” spot is in red!

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

The Hierarchy of Visual Understanding

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From The Dashboard Spy. We business intelligence dashboard practitioners and project sponsors often hear (and use) the phrase “from data to knowledge” when evangelizing the business intelligence projects we undertake.

Take a look at this diagram called the Hierachy of Visual Understanding:

The Hierarchy of Understanding

David McCandless over at InformationIsBeautiful.net presents this “thinkpiece”. See Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom. Visit the blog post. He’s looking for thoughtful commentary on that diagram. I think the discussion will benefit from contributions from Business Intelligence experts.

The top of the pyramid is interesting. The move from “Knowledge” to “Wisdom” is seldom addressed in organizations. Is it possible? Can business intelligence dashboards play a role in that transition?

Interesting.

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Excel Tag Clouds

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Here’s a pointer to an excellent Microsoft Excel tutorial that discusses how to create word tag clouds in excel. Specifically, it shows you how to insert Wordle tag clouds in your excel dashboards.

What is a tag cloud? It’s an information visualization device that represents the weight, frequency and overall relevance of certain terms in a document. For example, here’s a tag cloud for the Springstein song, “Born in the USA”:
tag cloud for lyrics in springstein born in the usa

It was created in wordle.net.

Cool, right? But did you know that you can bring that wordle tag cloud into your excel dashboard?

Thanks to the Cleary and Simply blog by Robert Mundigl we have this excellent discussion of integrating wordle and excel. Take a look at

Wordle Tag Clouds in Excel

There’s even a download of the example excel workbook with tag cloud for you to play around with.

When you land on the post, you’ll see that this whole discussion was prompted by our friend Chandoo and his excellent excel dashboard tutorial. Remember this excel dashboard?
Excel dashboard tutorial

You can learn how to build the excel dashboard in this excel dashboard tutorial.

Enjoy!

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Build This Flex Dashboard

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Excellent Dashboard Programming Resource via The Dashboard Spy. This 10 minute video from AdobeTV walks you through the construction of a Flex Dashboard connected to PHP services. The charting components communicate with data in a mysql database.

Flex Dashboard Tutorial

The downloadable assets that accompany this tutorial are available here:

Adobe’s Build My First Dashboard

You’ll be able to download the source code of the project, a MySQL database and a generic PHP service. The Adobe Flash Platform is used by several actors of the Business Intelligence industry (SAP Business Objects, MicroStrategy…). A lot of customers use the Flex framework to rapidly build expressive dashboards. The charting components of the Flex SDK are open source and they should answer your needs. The sample I’ve developed is quite simple, but there are more advanced components available on the market (IBM Elixir, KapIT, Axiis…).

The Marketmesa Dashboard Story

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Dashboard Spy fans know that I love a good story. Nothing thrills me more than when a reader tells me the “story behind the dashboard”.

Here’s the tale behind the Marketmesa 3D Charting dashboard as told to me by Charlie Rosendorf:

The idea for Marketmesa came about some years ago when I was trying to compare the performances of several stocks and mutual funds at the same time. I found that advertised mutual funds’ performances were presented from the best point of view, and dates, of their parent mutual fund family.

However, to get a more meaningful picture of relative performance, I needed to use dates important to me.

I needed something that could compare stock market entities of apples to oranges to pears. I could not find anything that performed that function, so I created Marketmesa, a 3D charting dashboard that can monitor the performances of hundreds, it turned out, of any entities at the same time.

Marketmesa is a ready-made feedback reporting tool that enables the rapid monitoring of entities and the affects that changes made by me or external influences have on an entity’s performance – no user design is necessary.

Entities can also be any business metric or each student’s academic performances in a school system, benchmarking crystalizes where resources can be conserved – or more need to be allocated.

The point is, Marketmesa can simultaneously illustrate a vast array of entity performances, helping to uncover opportunities for development.

The 3D Charts module empowered me to make at-a-glance assessments.

The Stocks dashboard module is designed to allow flexible slicing and dicing of the data for focused results.

Here is a snapshot of the Marketmesa Stocks’ Compare screen where most selections are made.

marketmesa

Events can be substituted for dates, i.e. event 1 = date 1, event 2 = date 2, etc.

The 3D chart examples displayed here and on the http://www.marketmesa.com website can each display a different selection of up to 126 entities and up to any 16 dates each, or the equivalent of almost 2000 dials and guages.

The number of different 3D charts that can be displayed on one screen is limited only by your PC’s resources.

Because of copyright issues, only repeated fictitous data can be presented here:

marketmesa charting dashboard

Not all dates are created equal, and Marketmesa’s concept is so important the U.S. Patent Office recently granted me a patent.

Because Marketmesa can display so many entities at a time, it has the global artistic value of illustrating humanity’s efforts to serve itself with worldwide goods and services.

Now that’s an impassioned view of one’s dashboard, isn’t it?

Check out the Marketmesa dashboard at http://marketmesa.com

Dashboard Best Practices

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Many dashboards are built, but how many dashboard projects are really truly successful?

Here are some Dashboard Project Best Practices from the article “How a Dashboard Transformed Technical Leads“.

It’s a very thoughtful writeup about the success of a dashboarding project.

Here’s an excerpt:

The dashboard enables the Project Review Team in this organization to help PMs to focus on the six best practices for any projects, the same practices used in developing the dashboard itself:

  • BEST PRACTICE #1: get stakeholder buy-in with prototypes, and develop specific strategies to address key concerns early.
  • BEST PRACTICE #2: develop iteratively, delivering value-added functionality quickly, and get feedback promptly.
  • BEST PRACTICE #3: prioritize requirements where the priority order is the implementation order. Perform change control for non-trivial requirement changes and enhancements.
  • BEST PRACTICE #4: track progress and take early corrective actions. Resolve issues, external dependencies, and risks to closure, escalating proactively.
  • BEST PRACTICE #5: continuously verify quality and perform architecture, design and code reviews as appropriate.
  • BEST PRACTICE #6: manage configuration items throughout the project lifecycle.

And here were the very impressive project “wins”:

  • Weekly enterprise status reporting now took a couple of hours instead of days.
  • The dashboard project created wins for stakeholders across the organization:
  • Win #1: Every project is now managed using at least six (6) standard, regularly updated artifacts: project charter, schedule, risk/issue log, staffing plan, financials, and weekly status report.
  • Win #2: Project managers are able to update their project status within minutes on a weekly basis. The dashboard scrapes the six standard project artifacts to provide status updates on the dashboard.
  • Win #3: There is transparency, consistency, and predictability for projects across the organization. Visibility encourages PMs to pay attention to sound project management practices.
  • Win #4: There has been no format change for weekly status reports for 2 years. The dashboard provides a multi-layered and component view of project status. The summary dashboard offers an at-a-glance view of schedule, budget, and risk indicators for new development and sustaining projects and non-software initiatives. Each project dashboard provides details about key planned vs actual releases, milestones, deliverables, accomplishment this week vs goals for next week, and key risks/issues and dependencies. Readers who are interested in additional drill-downs can view the full project schedule and risk log, look at detailed project metrics, staff and task order information.
  • Win #5: There is now a single repository of project information with real-time updates for management reporting and informed decision-making.
  • Win #6: The development of the dashboard minimizes custom coding by leveraging the out-of-the-box features of SharePoint. This dashboard system is fully documented from a user’s and operational point of view, and is highly maintainable.
  • Win #7: The dashboard was created at a fraction of the typical cost of purchasing, implementing, and rolling out a comprehensive project portfolio management tool. The total cost of ownership was between 1/5 to 1/10th of the estimated cost quoted by market tool vendors. Because the dashboard took advantage of existing systems and tools in Alpha Corp, its adoption was relatively painless and quick.
  • Win #8: Best of all, the Alpha Corp dashboard enables PMs to focus their time and energy on what really matters: early delivery of low-risk software to their stakeholders, while offering transparency on the status of their weekly challenges, accomplishments, and goals for the next week.

Tags: Dashboard Best Practices