It’s day 4 of our first agile ITOps sprint and so far it’s pretty much going to script. Our estimation of how much work we would be able to get through is looking roughly in the right ballpark (for more details on how we did the estimating, and other stuff see Agile ITOps: Day 1)

Looking at our sprint board a couple of things are fairly apparent. Firstly, that we were right about the number and frequency of interruptions, and secondly that we’re going to need a bigger board:

We’re going to need a bigger board

One of the things we aimed to achieve with the sprint board was to raise the visibility of the constant “interruptions” we have to work on. To do this we decided to note down every “interruption” on a red/pink card. As you can see in the picture above, we’ve worked more on interruptions than we have on our committed tasks. This was exactly what we expected to see.

Another thing we expected to see was a correlation between the number of interruptions we had, and the amount of project work we achieved. It was expected that on days where there were a high degree of interruptions, the number of project points completed would drop off. That hasn’t quite materialised yet, as you’ll see in the burndown below:

2 Plus 2 Doesn’t Equal 4?

Another thing that we’re expecting to see is that the maths just don’t add up. What I’m saying is that I don’t expect the team to be 100% productive when you add up the completed tasks we committed to deliver, plus all the points we did on interruptions. The reality is that people can’t automatically switch from one task to another and not lose any productivity. At the end of this sprint I’m hoping to be able to get a rough estimate of this “lost time”. In due course I will try to see if there’s any relationship between the amount of “lost time” and the types of tasks/interruptions we work on, so that we can effectively “cost” some of our regular tasks.