Agile project dashboard: delivery, capacity and cost

An agile project dashboard compares completed work, team capacity and project cost against the same period's plan. It should explain whether the team delivered what it expected and what that delivery consumed. A completion percentage alone cannot answer the cost question.

Start with a fixed review boundary

Use a completed review period, a saved opening plan and an agreed completion rule. This example covers a Chicago consulting company's customer implementation project from October 5 through October 16, 2026. It uses project records and time-record exports for a business delivery review.

The opening plan contains only work expected to finish during that period. Work is completed only after the agreed acceptance checks are met. For teams using Scrum, the Scrum Guide requires work to meet the Definition of Done before it forms part of an Increment. A status that means work has merely been submitted is a different boundary.

Save the original plan rather than replacing it with the final list. Otherwise, removing unfinished items can make completion look better without changing delivery. The broader project KPI dashboard covers the wider measure set; this review concentrates on delivery, capacity and labor cost.

Bring three exports with matching periods

The project export needs a unique work ID, workstream, original planned period, completion status and acceptance date. The time export needs a unique entry ID, work date, project, workstream and approved hours. The cost file supplies the approved labor rate for each workstream in this example.

Keep the capacity schedule alongside them. Available hours should reflect the team's actual assignment to this project after leave and other commitments. Planned project hours and available project hours are different inputs: the first describes the intended work; the second describes the resource boundary.

The example has no added or canceled work, no overtime premium and no nonlabor project costs. Every time entry belongs to a single workstream. Those assumptions make the arithmetic visible; a real review should identify the corresponding exceptions explicitly.

A worked delivery and capacity view

These workstream totals come from the original plan, accepted work records and approved time entries.

The dashboard calculates each measure from the total rows:

Plan completion = Completed original-plan items / Originally planned items

Capacity load = Actual project hours / Available project hours

Completion is 16 / 20 = 80.0%. Unfinished original-plan work is 20 - 16 = 4 items. Capacity load is 380 / 400 = 95.0%, leaving 400 - 380 = 20 hours of available capacity unused.

Those results describe different things. High capacity load does not establish that work was finished, and unfinished items may already contain substantial effort. The Kanban Guide defines throughput as the count of finished work items per unit of time. Here, throughput is 16 items for this review period; it is not the number of hours recorded.

Do not compare workstream item counts as though the items were interchangeable. Training tasks and integration coordination tasks can differ substantially in size. Use the count to inspect the team's delivery trend under consistent definitions.

Add cost without treating hours as progress

Apply the approved rate to both planned and actual hours. The rates below are internal project labor costs, not customer billing rates. Dollar amounts are exact; percentages are rounded to one decimal place.

Actual cost is 150 × 100 + 120 × 120 + 110 × 80 = $38,200. Planned cost is 140 × 100 + 110 × 120 + 110 × 80 = $36,000. The overrun is $2,200, or 2,200 / 36,000 = 6.1% of budget.

The useful review statement is now precise: the team completed 80.0% of the opening plan, used 95.0% of its available capacity and exceeded the period labor budget by 6.1%. None of those measures establishes how much effort remains.

For the accounting boundary and cost categories, use project cost management. For revenue, billing and margin alongside these costs, move to the project finance dashboard.

Change one input and read the difference

Suppose the integration coordination export instead contains 100 actual hours. Keep the original plan, available capacity, rates and completed work unchanged.

The revised cost is 15,000 + 12,000 + 8,800 = $35,800. It is $200 below the unchanged $36,000 budget, a 0.6% underspend after rounding. Capacity load becomes 360 / 400 = 90.0%.

Delivery has not changed. This is why lower spending must not automatically be described as better project performance. First establish whether the hours reflect a correction, unused capacity or work still to come.

Checks and common mistakes

Before discussing causes, reconcile completed work IDs to the accepted-work export and hours to approved time entries. The workstream cost totals must equal the labor cost total used by finance for the same scope and dates. Explain accruals or rate adjustments rather than hiding them in a balancing amount.

• Changing the original plan. Record additions and removals separately so the opening commitment remains visible.
• Counting partial work as completed. Keep effort incurred on unfinished work in cost, while keeping the item outside completed delivery.
• Mixing project and company capacity. A person's entire paid week is not necessarily available to this project.
• Using billing rates as labor costs. That changes the meaning of the spending measure and can distort the budget comparison.
• Treating an overrun as a diagnosis. Check rework, scope and timing with the delivery owner before attributing a cause.

Review your own project exports in Covirage

Bring a sample of your own project, capacity and approved time exports to Covirage. Covirage maps the columns, and its tools compute and check delivery, hours and cost comparisons; the external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account and set up your business with your own files.

See project cost control for the supporting business use case.