Agile Project Management Template
 Keeping track of everything can be difficult on Agile projects. I have seen them descend into chaos simply because there is no central place where requirements are being kept and sprints being tracked. Equally I have seen them come to a grinding halt where a well meaning project manager has decided a GANTT chart and Microsoft Project are essential to success.
Between the two is a happy medium that allows a centralised and disciplined approach to be applied to record keeping and management, while still offering the flexibility for Agile to deliver what it does best. This template is designed to do just that, offering the three core documents used to manage projects: the product backlog; sprint backlog and burn down chart.
This is a simple, yet powerful tool. The product backlog is where you keep the key deliverables that you expect your projects to deliver. You can allocate these against individual scrums and sprints (if you're using one product backlog across multiple projects), set their priority and keep track of whether they are being worked on.
There's also a template sheet for you to use as a sprint backlog. Using this you can keep track of which products you're delivering during the sprint and the tasks needed to complete them. With effort required and effort expended tracking across 10 day sprints a burn down chart is generated, allowing the project manager or scrum master to monitor progress.
Kept in a central location, shared across the project teams, you have the potential for a truly transparent approach. What's more (and this plays to the psychology of the traditionalists) the key criteria of having a structured plan, an estimate of effort and measurement of progress are there and demonstrable.
At the moment this template is in OpenOffice format. An Excel version will appear in due course.
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As always, any comments, suggestions and thoughts are welcome.
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