IAM Planning & Progress Reporting

May 18, 2018
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For the past 3 quarters the IAM team has been posting updates on our program progress every two weeks. The intent of this article is to describe how IAM does our Roadmap/Program Increment (PI) Planning and how to interpret the data posted in our bi-weekly Sprint Status reports.

Program Increment Planning: As a team we commit to quarterly objectives, and then update our progress against those objectives every two weeks publicly here on the IAM site. Jane Hill, Director of IAM Product Management, gave a presentation in 2017 at a local Boston Meetup that, while a bit dated now, does a very good job explaining how we break work down quarter over quarter. To understand the philosophy and challenges of planning check out the attached: Navigating the IAM Roadmap

End of Sprint Reports

Every two weeks we publish a progress report describing our progress against Commitment as Objectives for a given quarter which is comprised of 6 two-week sprints. Each progress report includes two documents, a summary report and a detail report. 

The Detail Report

To describe the detail report we will refer to the report published at the end of PI-13 Sprint 4.

The Detail report shows the ranked list of all priorities the IAM team is tracking for a given quarter. Each feature can have one of three distinctions:

  • Commit: The team has committed to completing this quarter as long as planned assumptions, priority, and level of effort is predictable.
  • Objective: A feature the team considers desirable, but cannot commit to for a quarter given other Commitments, priorities, or expected effort
  • Carryover: Only used when all the work is complete for a piece of work and the remaining activity is to complete deployment in Production.

For each feature the report shows, priority, expected value, target or completion dates for the work, current status, category of work, and primary customer.

Priority Report image

The Summary Report

The summary report is a bit of a misnomer as it actually summarizes feature progress, but also provides Operational statistics and Sprint over Sprint progress report. We will use the PI-13 Sprint 4 Summary Report to describe the elements of this report:

Goals Summary

Each quarter the goals of the program will be categorized into 4 high level "buckets". The Goals Summary will describe feature breakdown and progress against each of those domains, as well as provide information about the yearly program goals, and overall progress. 

% Done will calculate the % of Completed or Differed Features as compared to all Committed Features at the time the report was generated.

Goals Summary

Sprint Summary

The intent is to provide a historical record of progress at the end of every 2 week sprint. It begins by providing summary statistics of Feature progress by status. The remaining columns indicate the progress of a given feature. The columns, and what it means when a feature appears in said column is as follows:

  • New: The feature was added to the PI commitments during the sprint (it was not part of the original scope of commitment at the beginning of the quarter)
  • In Progress: Effort has begun on the given feature in this Sprint
  • Deferred or Canceled: Feature was marked as "Will not complete this quarter" for a reason which will be defined in the Sprint Close news story
  • Completed: Feature was finished this sprint.
Sprint Summary

Operational Activities

Each sprint the IAM team responds to hundreds of operational requests. This section provides Operational data about each sprint, the total for the quarter (the gray row), and the total for the fiscal year (bottom row). The content of each row is as follows:

  • Sprint # - One row for each 2 week sprint
  • Harvard Keys Claimed - Total HarvardKeys claimed by users this sprint (added in PI-14
  • # Changes Processed - Total of ServiceNow changes executed by IAM staff
  • Application Onboarding -  Total number of tickets Categorized as Application related (In-Flight = live as of the report publish date; Complete = Completed this sprint)
  • Service Now Tasks - Total number of Service Now Tasks executed by IAM staff (In-Flight = live as of the report publish date; Complete = Completed this sprint)
  • # Tickets Updated - Incidents updated by IAM Staff during the Sprint (often tickets are updated by IAM Staff but closed by other teams)
  • # Tickets Resolved - Incidents closed by IAM Staff during the Sprint
  • Open Tickets - Number of open tickets in IAM queues at the time of report execution, including On Hold tickets (added in PI-14
  • Duplicate / Overwritten IDs - Number of tickets closed related to users having duplicate data which can indicate system and process issues  (added in PI-13
  • Priority 1 & 2 Incidents - All priority 1 or 2 (most important) incidents reported in the Sprint and closed by IAM Staff
Ops Work

While this article includes lots of detail we hope it provides some insight into our processes and that it can be of use for customers inside Harvard and beyond.

navigatingiamroadmap.pdf2.08 MB