Completed Work
- Chris Boys
What is Completed Work
Completed Work measures how much planned work a team completes during a given interval.
Use Cases
GOAL: Help teams improve and/or stabilise how much work they can complete, and set guardrails around:
How much total work a team generally can complete to better manage everyone’s expectations
How much capacity a team needs to realistically ‘plan for the unplanned' and build greater agility into their workflow by being able to absorb ‘unplanned’ work
Make unplanned work visible, so teams can choose the type of work they can complete rather than react to what they’re working on
AS Mo, I want to be able to understand my total completion rate to know my team’s capacity and plan accordingly.
As Mo, I want to know, of the the work my team completes, how much is planned or unplanned (potential hidden work, reactive, customer, bugs etc) so that I can again, plan accordingly or change the process where it’s holding us back.
As Mo, I want to understand what type of unplanned work our team completes (tickets [sized or unsized], bugs, rework) so that I can improve our planning and review workflow.
Chart
Complete (Total line + Rolling) or (Cumulative - planned & unplanned)
Incomplete (Cumulative - planned and unplanned)
Callouts
As is
Surfacing
Complete
Item Title_Type_Assignee > Estimate > Date completed > Planned_Unplanned
Incomplete
Item Title_Type_Assignee > Estimate > Time in Status> > Planned_Unplanned
Why Completed Work 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’ Completed Work 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 that are assigned to a sprint including Stories, Tasks, Bugs and Spikes at the start of the sprint | All sub-tasks of tickets assigned to the sprint |
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
Resources
optimism bias
Little Law
Clubhouse Research
© Umano. All rights reserved.