What is it
Completed Work measures how much planned work a team completes during a given interval.
Why it matters
Understanding how much planned work is completed allows a team to plan more accurately and replicate their approach.
Teams can understand patterns that relate to consistently over planning a sprint, often the consequence of an unchecked ‘optimism bias’.
Incomplete work that is carried over to future sprints creates drag, affecting a team’s speed and progress.
What ‘good’ looks like
Teams will often set a goal for how much of their work they aim to complete, for example 80% of planned items. This acknowledges unplanned items can arise during the sprint and they need to retain capacity to respond and adapt accordingly.
How Umano measures this
From all of the planned items present at the start of the sprint, Umano identifies the percentage of those items that are completed during the same sprint.
Incomplete items are those that are still in the sprint that waiting to move into progress, or are in progress and yet to move to being resolved or done status.
Practices that influence this measure
Number of planned tickets removed mid sprint
Number of planned story points and or time estimates removed mid sprint
Number of tickets/story points/time estimates assigned per day at the start of a sprint
Number of tickets/story points/time estimates added mid-sprint
What’s included?
Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below a list of activities that contribute to Completed Work and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.
Included | Not included |
|---|---|
All work items in Jira that are assigned to a sprint including Stories, Tasks, Sub-Tasks, Bugs and Spikes |
Tips for improving completed work
Rank the priority of all tickets assigned to the sprint during sprint planning so it’s clear which items can be reprioritised if new and unplanned items need to be prioritised and assigned
Use your usual completion rate to guide how many tickets your team can realistically complete
Participate in regular sessions to groom your backlog so that if you’ve under-planned your sprint it’s easy for team members to select new items to work on
If you’ve over-planned your sprint, maintain momentum and focus by using your stand-up or check-in sessions to move lower priority items back to the backlog
Reprioritise your sprint load rather than accepting new items into the sprint and not removing or reprioritising existing items
Resources
optimism bias
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