OmniPlan and SCRUM support / Burndown charts
 

Have you thought about implementing any features that would support SCRUM?

Our development organization is very much not a plan and control type of group. While there are dependencies to be "managed", they are best not managed (for various reasons) through a detailed list of predecessors and successors on a project plan. What I really want is the ability to do two things:

1. Manage a burndown

I want to be able to enter the tasks within a time period (whether that be the entire project, end-to-end, or a sprint), their effort (the estimates of which may change day-to-day), and then track the burndown of that effort over our time period and compare it against available remaining hours (based on a standard work week).

As a bonus, I want to measure variance against initial estimates, etc., as a way to help future planning.

2. See that by person

I want to see what each person is working on, their own personal burndown, allocation, and all the other good stuff.

Does anyone else have a need for this? I did a lot of plan and control stuff when I worked in professional services, but now that I'm working in internal software development, with fast release cycles, I just find it much less useful.

This has been touched on [URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3339"]before[/URL].

As a former ScrumMaster myself, I am interested to see this happen, but we haven't really heard enough demand from users (or potential users) to justify adding these sorts of features. So if you know other people who are looking for this, encourage them to post here, or [URL="mailto:omniplan@omnigroup.com"]contact us[/URL].

It would certainly be possible to create these sorts of graphs with some AppleScript pulling the data out of OmniPlan, but I suspect that wouldn't be much improvement over an excel spreadsheet. Plus, you'd have to do some weird mental math every time you updated OmniPlan. ("OK, Bob says there's 1 day of effort left on this task, and he started it 3 days ago, so I should make it a 4 day task and 75% done.") That starts to sound rather un-scrum-like, and I'm not sure what you gain from it.

What does OmniPlan give you that an Excel (or Google) spreadsheet doesn't?

[QUOTE=Lizard]
What does OmniPlan give you that an Excel (or Google) spreadsheet doesn't?[/QUOTE]

Ease of use and resource-level reporting. Excel can be used to do a lot of things if you have the time to create all the formulas, but it's not meant to be a PM tool, and I don't want to spend a lot of time futzing with the tool to make it work. In excel, can I create forumlas to give me resource-level data? Sure, but the hope is that the resource-level reporting is all nicely integrated and I don't have to spend a bunch of time with =sumif(blah...) functions.

I really see it as a couple new views on the data, plus some new inputs to support a sprint:

View 1: Burndown graph view

This view would have a filter (by Resource Group, by Person) which would show the Sprint (or project) and its burndown graph.

View 2: Enhanced resource view

This would show, by resource (& group), something like the attached picture.

The rocking, game-changing feature of this would be to make it server-based, and allow team members to update this on their own. Project X has this (a server, & tasks can be updated through an OSX Dashboard widget), but doesn't support SCRUM (as far as I know) and is in general a huge pain in the <ahem> to use.

To add my vote: I, for another, would really appreciate the addition of something like this. The more options we have for managing the overall schedule online, in a form which can be accessed clearly by others, the better off any and all project managers will be.

Count my vote for Agile tools

Another BIG vote for exactly what he described!
 

I love the whole Omni software family and I think you have the basis of the perfect agile project management solution. It is lightweight, easy to use and I love the clean UI.

If you had explicit Agile/Scrum support (burn down reports, sprint task lists), OminiProject would be hands down 1st choice.

If you added some network capabilities, even lightweight, where I could dump these task lists out for my team to see and _edit_ with their input....I would become an Omni-evangelist!

Votes added all-around! :-)

One more vote for Scrum support
 

As a Scrum Master and very, very happy user of OmniFocus and OminiGraffle, I would love to see a tool for managing Scrum.

Another vote for agility

There are other tools for managing agile projects but the ones I am familiar with are windows based.

I would love to have the option to bounce back & forth between traditional waterfall Gantt charts (for upper management planning & reporting) to Agile sprint planning tools for the project team. This feature would also be helpful for organizations transitioning to Agile from traditional methodologies.

I would also like to see better integration across the omni line.
I currently do a lot of my project planning in Conceptdraw Mindmap. Export to MS Project XML. it would be preferable, If I could easily mindmap in omnigraffel export to omniplan & Omnioutliner and back. Even-better if I could produce sprint burndowns in Plan and not need to create these in excel.

I want, I want , I want...

Yes, please!
 

I've been using omniplan but have found the limitations for scrum/agile development quite stifling. To the point that I no longer use omniplan except at the beginning of a project but it is only a bit better than omnioutliner in this regard...as we do not revisit the project items. We're back to using a whiteboard -- great, but not quite as "open" as the html export I've used as a much appreciated project update snapshot.

damocles: We haven't put any scrum/agile features in yet, so I'm not surprised you find OmniPlan stifling. If you would take the time to write up a list of what you feel is stifling or missing, please send it to our Support Ninjas (omniplan@omnigroup.com). We are considering this feature and if we have the opportunity to add it, we'd like to make sure we create what people are looking for.

Please add a vote for SCRUM Support for me

Please send an email to the feedback address ("Send Feedback" from the Help menu) to get your vote/preference recorded, as we have a system for tracking all email, whereas anything in the forums has to be handled manually (and is therefore much more prone to not making it into the system).

SCRUM/Burndown charts
 

Please add my vote for SCRUM (Burndown charts).
Thanks

Yes please.
 

We need burndown charts. Thanks!

+1
 

+1

Votes added for all. Thanks!

Agile Please! Thanks
 

+1

Ok, I just wanted to register so I can throw my support behind this! Please, I beg of you! The tools for Agile (JIRA) are awful. Please make a OS X production app that only app for agile development. Make sharing/synching, managing the product backlog, sprint schedule, prioritization, ease of use, and you definitely have a purchase or two from me!

I think the time has come for Omni, a thought-leader in the industry, to get ahead of the pack and implement Agile / Scrum support for OmniPlan. Please let me know if you think Omni will do this.

Well, what constitutes Agile/Scrum support, in your mind?

I know it's been almost a year since the last post, but Scrum, kanban, and Agile in general has become very important. Please tell us your plans and add to Omniplan/Omnifocus 2!

thanks,

paul