Directly inspired and partially stolen from BigVisible Certified Product Owner training (with permission, and changed)
PMPs love percent complete. Although it is an illusory measurement (things change!), you will still get requests for the statistic. Here are two ways to provide what I feel awful encouraging
1. Plain old Metrics
Take a peek:
The above is pretty easy to understand, but the percent complete field comes from the total number of story points in a given feature (the pure sum of the points belonging to stories within a feature) and the number of points for features that have had all stories complete. There is your number, viola. Is it accurate? As long as nothing is added to the feature, sure I guess it is as accurate as anything can be given context. Better question might be “is it wrong or misleading” and the answer would be “depends, but you are not lying or misrepresenting what you are being asked for.” If I ask you to poke me in the eye, you might do a really good job at it and blind me, but does that mean you completed a valid task? Depends on who you ask, their mind state, their goal, and a number of things but overall – yeah, you did. Thanks a lot.
2. Colors… mmm… (not the movie nor the song where “I am a nightmare walkin’, psychopath stalkin’…” because I am not. Just like RGB values, you know… the whole Color Wheel thing?)
People like colors. With this method you get not only more detail, but what might be a more accurate (or complete) view of what is complete. Your “not started” line will look smaller, but that is not a function of misrepresentation, only of the technique. “In Progress” might mean it just started or that it is almost done, but it is just a tool.
Something besides Excel would be better than this, as the legend states (maye an .mpp although your PMPs might freak) because your Story Points could be numbered left to right with a degree of accuracy that I cannot provide at the moment. Again, the goal is the same. You get block which represent features but the WIP (Work In Progress) exists as something real and tangible. For the overall Epic, you could in theory have a giant list of these that together spelled out the whole schebang and I do expect this may only serve to elicit “so, how close are we?” at which point you can either stare like a gopher who just popped his head out of his hole or be almost as cool as a quick draw cowboy and whip out the first diagram.
Satisfy your stakeholders but remain honest and educate without preaching.
This was Percent Complete, which is a side effect of estimation and not all side effects are bad. Next, you can expect something on Prioritization. I actually really dig Prioritization.
Best Regards,
Josh