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Currently I'm leading our agile team in an iteration manager role as well as doing my regular dev work. One of the difficulties I'm facing as an IM is tracking burn-down/burn-up; not because I can't produce graphs, but because there's multiple projects that this team is working on at one time.

At present I have an excel workbook with sheets that contain a whole bunch of graphs, both at an overall team and by-project level. It's clunky and I spend more time tweaking formulas and double checking calculations than I'd really like. As such, I'm interested to know if anyone has used a tool that can effectively produce these sorts of reports, burn-downs, and predictions across multiple projects.

I've seen http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ do some nice things, and of course there's JIRA/Greenhopper, but I'm not aware of those being used to track the progress of multiple projects within one team. If anyone's got an idea of some tools, or has faced a similar problem before, I'd love to hear from you.

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I think single team working on multiple projects is right against agile methodology. Either create multiple teams or merge those projects into one. – Euphoric Oct 15 '12 at 5:38
Not sure how merging several projects into one solves anything. You might have a team that is tasked with 'improve website accessibility' project, 'add shopping cart feature to website', and normal BAU work. You want to show how focusing more energy on one thing will affect the delivery of the others - that's a simple representation of what my workplace is doing, anyway. – f1dave Oct 15 '12 at 5:45

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You could try using Scrumworks Pro. We use it in my organization.

It essentially allows you to have multiple Products which you could map to your projects. You can also define Teams and add a team to one or more Products, and also add multiple teams to a single Product.

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Well I don't know how your company / teams are organized, so I am just responding with some general ideas and my personal experience.

We are a small agile team working on 2 different projects, sometimes 3 projects. What we did to solve problems like yours was that we allocated a whole iteration to a single project, always. This helped in 2 ways:

  • We didn't head your partitioning problem any more.
  • We made less switching between projects thus making transition waste less.

I am not aware that there are any products capable of combining several projects into one chart. We work with the Attlasian tools (Jira & co) and they are pretty well made.

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Interesting idea - were your projects for the same stakeholders? I ask because in our line of work, we might have projects 1,2,3 that are prioritised in that order for the customer(s). Now if someone wants to come along and say that project 3 is the number one priority and we dedicate 80% of our ongoing time to it (instead of a previous 30%) I need to be able to say what impact that has on the delivery of other projects. – f1dave Oct 15 '12 at 8:34
Well. In my case the projects were / are to the same stakeholder, so I can't tell anything from experience. However, you may consider juggling with the iteration time. So, let's say you have 3 weeks iterations and a priority project comes in site. Reduce your iteration to 1 week, assign one to the priority project and 2 to the other project. Or do it intermittently, one week one project the other week other project, if both have the same importance and has to be worked on simultaneously. – Patkos Csaba Oct 15 '12 at 10:58

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