Month: December 2009

Agile Project Management, Estimating, Leadership, Lean, Metrics, Planning, Risk Management, Teams

Project Progress, Optical Illusions, and the Simpsons

My last post was on modifying Parking Lot Diagrams to use the area of boxes to show the relative effort of differing parts of the system. The idea was that while traditional Parking Lot diagrams are a great way of summarizing progress at a project level, the customary approach of giving all the feature groups the same size box may lead people to believe these chunks of functionality are of equivalent size or complexity. In the boxes below, the number in brackets describes the feature count, but this requires people to read the numbers and then consider the relative sizes. My goal was to create a new graphical summary that depicts the relative sizes via box area to make the […]

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Agile Project Management, Estimating, Metrics, Planning

Parking Lot Diagrams Revisited – Using Area to Show Effort

Parking Lot diagrams are a great way of summarizing an entire project’s progress and status onto a single page. They illustrate work done, work in progress, work planned and identify what is behind schedule. In this example we can see that “Stock Search” in red, is behind, it was due to finish in November. “Create New Order” shown in green is complete, the boxes in yellow are ‘in progress’ and those in white have not been started yet. I have posted previously about their use and examples of how to produce them. However, they miss an important element, the relative sizes (usually in terms of effort, but could be cost or risk) of the functional areas. So, in the example above, […]

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