“If you only quantify one thing, quantify the cost of delay." – Donald Reinertsen, author of “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development”
Overview
We are trying to help some teams and their leadership at our client’s site assess the true cost of various types of delay that they’ve become reconciled to (or, in some cases, comfortable with). At the team level, this would be tracked by analysis of blocked work.
The teams have agreed to be more vigilant in marking stories as “Blocked” for all “outside” causes. This means they don’t mark a story blocked because their own code had a defect, obviously. Rather, they mark stories blocked for environment issues, unanticipated 3rd party dependencies and issues, unexpected (i.e., did not have plans for it) lack of access to a shared resource, lack of alignment with dev ops, lack of alignment with system patching schedules, lack of alignment with other teams, approving agents not available, etc., etc., etc.
See the attached Word Doc for the app idea I'm trying to conjure up. I think it might be more ambitious than my nascent skills will support in any timely manner.
- I don't think the standard GRID will support the expanded and collapsed incidents as I envisioned them.
- I would try to use the Lumenize API to collect information for how long things remained in the blocked state.
- I would have to either use custom fields (blech on adding more custom fields to CA Agile Central) to track Blocked Categories and Blocked Root Causes or an external data source like Cassandra (blech on using an external data source instead of one system of record for such things).
So, any experienced app developer who wants to offer suggestions on approach would be a highly esteemed person, to say the least.
Biggest Challenge
The standard Tree Grid is geared toward the built-in object hierarchy (i.e., Beneath a feature, one finds stories. Beneath stories, one may find child stories, defects, and tasks, etc.). I need to use a tree grid with specialized behavior. It needs to show snapshots of work items in time, with the collapsed view rendering summary information (e.g., adding up / rolling-up all the durations from the individual instances below).