Understanding Project Delivery Trackers

LinearB’s Project Delivery Tracker is a business alignment dashboard that provides visibility into the investment allocation and progress of engineering projects over time. Project Delivery Trackers are defined using your project management platform (currently supported for customers who use Jira), and are highly configurable and can be adjusted at any time, allowing you to monitor multiple PM boards, specific epics, tags, and labels, fix versions, or even specific fields within your PM platform. LinearB will visualize this information differently for Scrum or Kanban projects. 

How are metrics in the Project Delivery Trackers calculated?

Planning Accuracy  (Scrum)

Planning accuracy measures the ratio between planned issues or story points and what were in fact delivered from that list. Accuracy < 70% indicates potential over-commit. Accuracy > 95% indicates potential under-commit. This percentage is calculated using your Delivery metrics. The number of completed (not including added) issues/story points is divided by the number of planned issue/story points.

Capacity Accuracy (Scrum)

Capacity accuracy measures how many issues/story points your team completed in an iteration (planned and unplanned) compared to the planned amount. Capacity accuracy answers the question: “Is my team taking on an amount of work that they can reasonably accomplish?”

Velocity (Kanban)

Velocity measures the number of issues that were completed on average per week, as well as a weekly breakdown of the number of issues completed in each week.

Delivery

The Delivery row will be visualized differently depending on whether the project is Scrum or Kanban. 

Scrum projects will display planned, added, completed, and uncompleted issues. These numbers are tracked over time to show accuracy trends. 

• Planned issue/story points - Planned story points or issues for your time-frame.
  • Hover over each section to see the number of planned issues or story points which were completed and uncompleted.
• Added issues/story points - Story points or issues added over 24 hours after a sprint begins.
  • Hover over each section to see the number of added issues or story points which were completed and uncompleted.
• Average Completed/Added work - Depending on the time-frame you are viewing, the average number of issue/story points completed per iteration, and the average number of issue/story points added per iteration.

These counts may not directly align with issue counts within Jira for a number of reasons:

• Project Delivery Trackers can span over multiple iterations, collecting data from a different date range than Jira may show.
• Trackers can collect data from multiple Jira boards, or focus on a specific tag or epic, and would not show a count of all issues in a board.
• Unplanned tickets opened and left unclosed during an iteration are not pulled into this report. Trackers focus on completed tasks. The delivery breakdown is gathering a count of your planned tasks, how many of these were completed, and if any additional work was added and completed to your planned work.

Kanban projects use a Cumulative Flow Diagram to display the total issues/story points in each swim lane in Jira. The swim lanes are collected directly from the Jira boards connected to your specific Project Delivery Tracker

Investment Profile

The investment profile page uses data from your project management platform to visualize the investment being made by issue type. Issue types are highly configurable to the PM platform. LinearB will display all Jira issue types found within the boards connected to your Project Delivery Tracker.

Active People/People Effort

Percent of team members invested

This percentage calculates the active contributors divided by the number of team members included in all projects.

• What is an active contributor?
  • Any user assigned to tickets that were moved to done during the sprint/period. Assigned is based on the assignee field in Jira. In case the ticket has no assignee, we fall back to the reporter/creator of the ticket.
• What is the denominator? Who are all team members?
  • This number is determined by the number of active contributors in all Project Delivery Trackers. You can see this number at the top of your Projects page.

    

  • Some contributors may be working on multiple projects, one shouldn't expect to be able to sum the percent of team members invested number across all projects to 100%, there will likely be some duplication and overlap between projects.

The average number of team members active per iteration 

This sums the number of active contributors for each iteration/week, and divides it by the number of iterations/weeks your Project Delivery Tracker is viewing. Changing the date range your tracker is viewing will update this number. Note that this is not unique contributors, if a contributor is active in multiple iterations, they would be counted for each iteration in which they were active.

Most active team members 

The team members who have contributed to the most iterations/weeks displayed in your Project Delivery Tracker. If your Project Delivery Tracker is viewing a 6-week span, and a contributor has moved a ticket into done status in each of these weeks, they will be marked as active for 6 weeks, and will likely be your most active contributor.

People effort over time 

This is the number of unique users completing work per iteration/week. This graph displays the number of users who have marked an issue as done in each iteration/week.

Click on any week or iteration to the right to see a list of which team members contributed to that specific iteration/week.

What Can I Include in Project Delivery Trackers?

Jira Boards (one Jira board is required)

You can include multiple Jira boards in one project. Use additional filters such as epic, labels, or your custom fields to refine and filter your results.

Epics

Combining multiple epics from various boards can give insights into how cross-functional projects are progressing.

Labels

You can collect issues from multiple boards that use the same label. Track all issues created for specific features, or web apps, and see how much effort and human capacity these issues generate.

Fix Versions

Track your projects based on your intended release date using fix versions.

Fields

Any custom field in Jira can be used to gather issues into your Project. Find out how much work and capacity is being taken up by issues marked as "infrastructure" or "technical debt", for example.