For Teams using Rally as their Project Management Tool, you are in luck:)

The typical artifacts for a Scrum team are Sprint Burndown, Release Burnup, and Velocity. I took it a step further and included Feature Tracking. To get started, you want to create a Work Space in Rally. Then created a program level node under the Business unit and then created all the Scrum teams below it.

How to setup a Dashboard

Once your Scrum teams have defined iterations (Sprints), a backlog, initial set of features and releases, then you can start tracking the teams via custom dashboards.

The steps to create a custom dashboard for an entire Program are:

1. Click on the My Home Icon on the top.

2. Click the plus sign to add a new dashboard.

3. Fill out the details for the Dashboard page (name, shared verses not shared, filter). If you Share your dashboard then everyone that has access to that business unit will have access to your dashboard.

4. Select the custom app (i.e. Sprint Burndown) that you want to display on the dashboard.

5. Then configure the app to display the data for the specific scrum team (if you need help to configure/customize the app, refer to my question and answer series).

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 till you cover all the teams for your Program.

Once you complete steps one to six, then you have a program dashboard for all your teams based on a single metric like Sprint Burndown, Release Burnup, Velocity, or Feature.

Conclusion

The dashboards are merely to give a high level view of which teams are healthy and which teams may need help. Don’t use the charts to micro manage but rather see which teams may need help. Another take away is that if you see that teams are forgetting to update their hours or link stories to features, etc., you may want to make some fields mandatory in Rally. Good Luck Scrumming!