Or “Yes, You Can Mix and Match”
Just to reassure you: yes, you can use different techniques together. I will take as an example the usage of burn-down charts as described for Crystal Clear. However, this technique can also be found elsewhere, as in Scrum and Extreme Programming. A burn-down chart is a chart that reflects the progress made on development. It will list the number of features on the y-axis and the time on the x-axis. As time progresses, the line should go down.
In more plan-driven methods, an updated Gantt chart can be used to indicate the progress. However, I like the simplicity and effectiveness in communication of this style of chart. In one clear image it says it all about the progress of development. Another nifty thing is that you can indicate scope increase in a clear manner (second chart in the figure). If you are on a tight deadline but users keep on adding requirements (scope increase), you can just up the line for the number of features left to complete and draw a new estimate line. By leaving the original line in the chart, you
make it very clear to the sponsors that you are running late because of the increase in scope.
Regardless of which method you use, even if plandriven like PMP and Prince 2, you can use this method of communication.
Tags: agile, burn-down-chart, gantt, planning, project-communication
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From my point of view, Gantt is not a tool to check the progress of a project -it is nice when you are on time, but it gets complicated as your client inject changes or you gets behind the schedule. However the simple burn-down isn't perfect. I made a change to the Y-axis by addind Level of Effort instead a count of features (for example, simple features / Use Cases can be have a value of 1, and complex ones could have a value of 10) so the line will be reduced in a representative way according to the Level of Effort executed.
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