Generating a MS Project plan out of Conchangos Scrum Template

The first thing which probably comes to your mind while reading the subject is: why would somebody want to do this? If you are familiar with Conchangos Scrum template you know that many reports which you need to control your Scrum project are already included.

So what is the sense of using MS Project? The simple answer: there is none. The customer demands MS Project plans to track progress and to have a transparent view at the progress. He could not been convinced of using agile reports as a basis for planning, etc. I could not influence this situation due to various reasons so the scenario which had to be solved was:

The solution I have found is the following:

• Extract the necessary data by creating a OLAP report with the information: One cumulated row per PBI per Person including the work remaining and the TFS WorkItem Id. I have chosen a cumulated item per PBI per person to avoid micro management and allow optimized parallel planning based on requirements.
  
• Save this report as an excel file.
  
• Create a MS Project Add-In using VSTO which reads the excel file and refreshes the Actual Work as Planned Work - Work Remaining.
  
• You will see the progress of the tasks in MS Project.

This solution took me three days to set up. The best solution for this problem probably is : convince your customer to trust in agile project management.