Urban Gypsy

Prior to Agile, our Sponsors were in the habit of committing a drop dead production release date and aggressively heightening the sense of urgency by asking the team if the product features are going to get delivered by that time.  When they got introduced to Agile.. they readily adopted the liberty to add/change the stories in the backlog but continued to hold us to the original deadline.  On one such project, my team and I used the Scope Burn Down chart to demonstrate to the sponsors that we are not only completing what was originally in the scope but also completing stories that have been added later on.  It also helped them visualize how much the scope changed at what point in the project.  

Using the Release Burn Down chart we were able to demonstrate that if they removed stories, we could deliver the project sooner.  This enabled the sponsors to take a hard look at the stories and remove the “nice to have” features (so called “bells and whistles” shown below the x-axis).  When they could no longer remove stories, we convinced them to split the delivery into two releases instead of one.  The first release had the features the users would want to see on day 1.  The second release had features that users would not use before the end of the year or early next year.