Using Burnup Charts for Project Management
Our most popular chart is our burn up. It's a great way to get a handle on several facets of your project at a glance. I like the way Allister Cockburn describes them in this article.
Burn charts have become a favorite way to give visibility into a project's progress. They are extremely simple and astonishingly powerful. They reveal the strategy being used, show the progress made against predictions, and open the door to discussions about how best to proceed, including the difficult discussions about whether to cut scope or extend the schedule. They have a natural mapping to the earned value charts used in military/government projects. They should part of your standard bag of tricks for project planning and reporting.
We generate burn up charts automatically for your projects and can even mail them to you daily.
At a glance you can see a number of key project metrics.
- Feature flux: are your requirements being added faster than you keep up? Are they being changed daily?
- Risk: is your development team's velocity on track for an on time delivery? Or are you sure to miss the end date?
- Project status: Are you 20% done or 90% done?
Our burn up chart is different than most of existing charts available though... it's accurate. Instead of pulling data on how long a task took from meeting notes or calendar time, we measure how long a developer worked on a feature and report that. And we pull the number of features left from your feature tracking software.
If it's in the system, we can see it. If a developer works on it, we can report it. And because we can pull data from a variety of different feature tracking systems (and adding new systems is easy), we can encapsulate you from the individual tools. We present the same burn up chart whether you're in Jira or Bugzilla.
If you haven't used a burn up chart for project management, I'd suggest you try it out.
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Random Syntax » Blog Archive » Revolutionise Project Management ( 2008.9.02 8:57 am )