Using Rally to track progress in Agile Scrum projects

Received training from Ernst and Young and I spent my first few days using Rally. Rally is a productivity tool specifically designed for teams delivering projects using the agile methodology. It seems excellent for taking a user story and allowing team members to add tasks to it.  The tasks each have an expected time to complete, which can be easily updated and directly feeds burn down charts both for the whole project and for the individual.

This looks as if it will be a very useful tool for capacity planning, understanding current progress and helping team members to continue to motivate themselves.

Agile scrum training

With one of my projects now moving out of the inception phase and into its first sprint, my team has had some additional training from Ernst and Young. Up until now, we have been working on user stories which are details of user requirements and how to test them. Now we have identified the first user stories that we are going to deliver and each member of the team is now defining their own tasks to help deliver those stories. This is being tracked using Rally (see separate post).

Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube

Inception phase begun for project.  Had a day of start up and explanation with Ernst & Young (EY) including this short intro to Agile.  It is not in any way officially endorsed by EY.  Apparently there is some advertising blurb at the end but the beginning is a concise and useful quick run through.

NEW Intro to Agile Scrum in Under 10 Minutes - What is Scrum? - YouTube:

Scrum reference card

This article is an introduction to the scrum way of working. The scrum is a self organising cross departmental team to deliver a project in a series of sprints. Each sprint delivers a version of the project which can be seen to be working, and although initially greatly simplified, is more complex than the previous version. This aims to avoid the risk of a project that gradually becomes more and more delayed and bogged down with unresolved problems until it fails.

Agile Project Management - brief book review

Agile Project Management For Busy Managers by Tony Riches

A succinct readable book introducing Agile Project Management.  In a nutshell, seems to say don't spend ages specing everything out in minute detail because things will change.  Identify easy wins and deliver minimum first followed by more.  This seems to tie in with the 'minimum viable product' ideas from lean manufacture.