In project management, organization is essential, and accurately tracking and measuring the progress of tasks is crucial. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is a powerful tool for teams dealing with these complex organizational challenges. This article aims to shed light on the nuanced process of tracking story points within ServiceNow SPM, a methodology that offers a more granular and agile approach to managing project timelines and workload. By leveraging story points, teams can gain insights into the effort required for individual tasks, facilitating more informed decision-making and enhancing overall project efficiency. Whether you’re new to ServiceNow or looking to refine your project management techniques, understanding how to effectively track story points in SPM can significantly impact your team’s success.
Agile Development in ServiceNow
ServiceNow’s Agile Development application provides a comprehensive set of tools to manage agile software development projects.
Some key features include:
- Creating products, agile groups, releases, and sprints
- Maintaining a personalized product backlog
- Tracking progress through scrum boards and burndown charts
- Enabling program-level views to coordinate multiple agile teams
The Agile Development 2.0 application helps organizations scale agile practices across the enterprise by providing visibility and coordination across multiple agile teams. This is where the concept of story points comes into play.
What are Story Points?
Story points are a unit of measurement used in agile development to estimate the effort required to complete a specific task. It is an abstract measure that takes into account various factors such as complexity, risk, and uncertainty associated with a particular task or user story. Often represented by numbers, story points allow teams to estimate and compare the effort required for various tasks, enabling them to prioritize and plan their workload effectively.
Tracking Time Worked on Agile Stories
One common request from leadership is to track the actual time spent on agile stories, rather than just story points.
ServiceNow provides a few options for this:
- Timesheet Management: The out-of-the-box timesheet functionality allows users to log time worked against specific stories. This time is then aggregated on the weekly timesheet. While this option allows for tracking actual hours worked, it can add an administrative burden for teams to log time individually.
- Time Worked Field: ServiceNow also provides a “Time Worked” field on agile stories, allowing users to manually enter the amount of time spent on a story. This is a more lightweight option compared to timesheet management but may not provide as much visibility into time spent on individual tasks.
- The “Time Worked” field is the recommended approach for agile teams, as it provides a simple way to track actual effort without disrupting the story point-based planning.
- Integration with Project Management Tools: ServiceNow can also integrate with popular project management tools like JIRA, allowing for automatic updates of time worked on stories. This option provides a seamless integration for teams already using these tools for their agile development.
Regardless of the method chosen, tracking actual time worked can provide valuable insights into team productivity and help with future planning and estimation. However, it is important to balance the benefits of tracking time against the potential administrative burden for team members. As agile values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, it is important to find a solution that works best for your team’s unique needs. So, choose wisely!
Reporting on Story Points
To report on total committed story points versus completed story points, you can create a custom report in ServiceNow:
- Create a report that sums the “total committed points” field from the rm_sprint table, grouped by sprint.
- Create a second dataset that sums the “completed points” field from the rm_sprint table, also grouped by sprint.
- Combine the two datasets into a multi-data layer report to visualize the committed vs. completed story points for each sprint.
- Alternatively, you can use the rm_story table to calculate the story points, summing the “points” field and grouping by the related sprint. This approach accounts for stories added to a sprint after it has started.
Tracking Story Points by User
To report on the total story points assigned to each user per sprint, you can use the following approach:
- Create a report that sums the “points” field from the rm_story table.
- Group the report by the “assigned_to” field (the user assigned to the story) and the related sprint.
- This will give you the total story points per user per sprint.
By leveraging the various features and reporting capabilities in ServiceNow’s Agile Development 2.0 application, organizations can effectively track and manage story points throughout the software development lifecycle. With accurate and comprehensive data on story points, teams can make informed decisions and continually improve their agile processes. From sprint planning to retrospective analysis, ServiceNow provides a powerful platform for managing agile development and delivering high-quality software products.
In conclusion, tracking story points is an essential aspect of agile development and can greatly benefit teams in their software delivery processes. ServiceNow’s Agile Development application offers various features and reporting capabilities to help organizations effectively track story points and make informed decisions throughout the development lifecycle.