Have you ever felt that you’re just guessing at when a new feature or enhancement is going to ship? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. One Quora user summed it up nicely: “The fundamental thing to remember about schedule estimation is that it means predicting the future. If anyone was actually any good at predicting the future, they’d use their skills on something more lucrative, like picking stocks.”
While you can’t predict the future, you can proactively update the business if/when a project looks to be going off the rails using an all-new tool in LinearB: Project Forecasting.
This significant enhancement provides a highly flexible view into projects and execution trends. It also offers a similar look and feel to PM tools you’re familiar with. But Project Forecasting takes it a step further with (1) simple filtering that enables you to slice the data in the most helpful way and (2) automatically-generated insights that you can action NOW.
In a nutshell, Project Forecasting helps you answer two crucial questions:
- Is my high-priority project behind schedule? Identify project delivery (anti) patterns
- How do I get my project back on track? Mitigate delay risks now using key insights not available in PM tools
Ready to get started with Project Forecasting? Click here!
Is my high-priority project behind schedule?
At the highest levels Project Forecasting will provide visibility into two key considerations for overall project health and on-time delivery: general progress trends and potential scope creep.
The progress over time view is customizable and can be presented in monthly or weekly intervals, broken out by issues or story points, over several date ranges. Best of all, you can bubble up exactly what you want to see using intelligent filtering by project, epic, team, and much more.
The project in this example is unlikely to be delivered on time (at least without intervention) because of two identified anti-pattern insights: The negative trend in completed work (down 1.5%) and the bars growing over time.
The first anti-pattern lets you know that teams are having trouble executing (more on this later). The second anti-pattern denotes scope creep–a big hurdle for on-time project delivery. Ideally the bars measuring issues or story points would remain consistent with the white “Accumulative Done” growing over time. In this case, the bars are steadily growing, meaning more issues are being added.
Pro tip: Focusing your team’s Accuracy Scores is a great way to combat scope creep. Check out our blog that dives deep into this topic.
How do I get my project back on track?
While the Progress Over Time breakdown provides clear signals into whether a project is at risk, the Insights tab shows you why and, more importantly, what you can do right now to get the project back on track.
Note: These insights are highly customizable, so they accurately reflect reality for your engineering teams.
Let’s explore three of these insights and how to action them:
- Issues stalled with no git activity: Shows how many issues have elapsed X number of days (you decide what’s right for you) with no git activity on associated branches, over the defined period of the Progress Over Time graph. The team(s) on the project with these issues would benefit from implementing WorkerB automated alerts about stale PRs to keep them on track.
- Issues missing git branch data: Shows how many of the in-progress issues do not have a branch associated with them. If this is high, try implementing this gitStream automation on your repo.
- Issues assigned to over-extended developers: Burnout is a big project delay risk. This insight shows how many developers are assigned to more than a defined number of in-progress epics (configurable to do what makes sense for you). This risk indicator can be mitigated by moving resources from another team to this project.
You can also easily take action on the other insights by having conversations with your team to ensure things like PM board hygiene are prioritized.
Project Forecasting Next Steps
This awesome new feature is now generally available for LinearB Paid accounts.
LinearB Users: Click here to get started with Project Forecasting.
For Non-LinearB Folks: See this feature in action and learn more!
Now get to project fortune telling and change the future!