This week I attended a one-day course called Forecasting and Coaching using data by Troy Magennis. 

To be totally honest I attended the course for two reasons:

I’m a bit of a ”number illiterate” and I’ve been doing a really bad job as a ScrumMaster  visualising data about how the teams I’m working in are operating

We are currently using a gut-feeling approach to estimate how long a piece of work will take to complete and it’s giving us really unreliable forecasts for projects. I’d much rather us not having to do estimates at all and that I could use historic data to make forecasts for project delivery dates   

Key take-aways from the course that you could start using today: 

The biggest reason projects don’t get delivered on time is not accounting for the actual start date... 

Most projects where suppose to start yesterday so they are already behind schedule. How to get around this? Until a project have actually started, don’t give a forecasted end date (or even a range of end dates), instead provide a range duration (for example 10 -14 weeks)

...And not taking in account the split-rate of stories 

When a team originally breaks down a project or bigger piece of work, we usually don’t have all the information and have to make a few assumptions. As we learn over time, we usually end up splitting stories into more detailed pieces of work. This needs to be taken in account when making a forecast (Troy covers this in the spreadsheets linked below)

You just need the start date and end date for each piece of work and whether its a user-story or a bug, to create an awesome team dashboard and starting to make forecasts 

If you’re using a physical board; start writing the start date and end date on each work item card (post-it, story card etc.) and use a different color card for whether its a user-story or bug. Use these dates to populate your team dashboard

If you’re using Jira you can easily grab this data (even historically)

Troy is extremely generous sharing all his spreadsheets for creating team dashboards or making forecast, they are available here on his GitHub: https://github.com/FocusedObjective/FocusedObjective.Resources/tree/master/Spreadsheets

There is A LOT of stuff on there, I’d recommend starting with the Team Dashboard v4.xlsx and Story Count Forecaster.xlsx if you’re a novice like me.