In Agile project management, it is crucial to get a clear picture of the project’s reality. Hence, one of the best ways is to visualize the progress.
A Burndown chart is a project management chart that shows the remaining work needed to reach project completion over time.
Let’s understand how can you create a burndown chart in Excel:
A Burndown chart visually represents teams’ or projects’ progress over time. It analyzes their pace, reflects progress, and determines if they are on track to complete it on time.
Burndown charts are generally of three types:
The product burndown chart focuses on the big picture and visualizes the entire project. It determines how many product goals the development team has achieved so far and the remaining work.
Sprint burndown charts focus on the ongoing sprints. It indicates progress towards completing the sprint backlog.
This chart focuses on how your team is performing against the work in the epic over time. It helps to track the advancement of major deliverables within a project.
A burndown chart has two axes: X and Y. The horizontal axis represents the time or iteration and the vertical axis displays user story points.
It is the diagonal line sloping downwards that represents the remaining work a team has at a specific point of the project or sprint under ideal conditions.
It is a realistic depiction of the team’s performance that is updated in real-time. It is drawn as the teams progress and complete user stories.
Each point on the work lines displays a measurement of work remaining at a given time.
It is the rightmost point of your burndown chart that represents whether the team has completed a project/sprint on time, behind, or ahead of schedule.
A Burndown chart helps in keeping an eye on teams’ work progress visually. This is not only simple to use but also motivates the team to perform well.
A burndown chart is useful to show the direct comparison between planned work and actual progress over time. This helps in quickly assessing whether the team is on track to meet its goals.
A burndown chart acts as a tool for inspiration. Such types of charts transparently show the progress and work efficiency. Hence, improving the collaboration and cooperation between team members.
A burndown chart must be updated daily. This helps in tracking progress in real-time, identifying problems in early stages hence, assisting in completing the project on time.
Open a new sheet in Excel and create a new table that includes 3 columns. This table will serve as the foundation for your sprint burndown chart.
Now, fill in the data accordingly. This includes the dates of your sprints and numbers in the Ideal Burndown column indicating the desired number of tasks remaining after each day throughout the, let’s say, 10-day sprint.
To do this effectively, start by clearly defining your planned tasks data. This data should reflect the number of tasks you expect to remain at the end of each day. Remember, this is your ideal work progression, and it won't account for unexpected delays or challenges.
Here’s a straightforward example to guide you:
It's crucial to update your actual tasks column daily as your team completes tasks. At the end of each day, record the number of tasks remaining. This will give you an accurate picture of how your team is progressing compared to your plan.
By maintaining this discipline, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy and resources in real time, ensuring your project stays on track.
As you complete tasks each day, update the spreadsheet to document the number of tasks you can finish under the ‘Actual Burndown’ column.
Now, it’s time to convert the data into a graph. To create a chart, follow these steps: Select the three columns > Click ‘Insert’ on the menu bar > Select the ‘Line chart’ icon, and generate a line graph to visualize the different data points you have in your chart.
Study project scope and divide the projects or sprints into short-term tasks. Ensure to review them and estimate the time required to complete each task based on the project deadline.
The Scrum master must check the chart often and update it daily. It helps to understand the flagging trends, know the pitfalls, and ensure it aligns with the expectations.
Don’t lose sight of the outcome. By focusing on it, software development teams can ensure they are making progress toward their goals and adjust their efforts accordingly to stay on track for successful project completion.
Teams pause the work during weekends or holidays. Excluding weekends provides accuracy by focusing solely on the days when active work is being done hence giving a clearer representation of progress and highlighting the team’s actual productivity levels during working days.
Burndown chart, when accessible to the entire team, fosters collaboration and accountability. It gives them a sense of ownership to discuss points to address challenges and celebrate achievements.
A burndown chart is great for evaluating the ratio of work remaining and the time it takes to complete the work. However, relying solely on a burndown chart is not the right way due to certain limitations.
Although creating a burndown chart in Excel is easy, entering data manually requires more time and effort. This makes the work repetitive and tiresome after a certain point. Fortunately, there are various tools available in the market that offer collaboration and automation features, including Jira, Linear, Trello, and Asana, which streamline this process significantly.
These tools allow for real-time progress tracking, where updates to burndown charts happen automatically as tasks are completed, saving hours that would otherwise be spent on manual input. This automation not only saves time but also reduces the risk of human error, ensuring that your reports are always accurate and up-to-date.
The Burndown chart helps in tracking the progress of completing tasks or user stories over time within a sprint or iteration. But, it doesn’t provide insights about the specific types of issues or tasks being worked on, such as shipping new features or determining technical debt. This is where advanced project management tools shine.
They offer visual reports and overviews that give you a birds-eye view of project health, timelines, and workload distribution. This comprehensive insight is something a simple Excel spreadsheet cannot match.
A burndown chart doesn’t differentiate between an easy and difficult task. It considers all of them equal, regardless of their size, complexity, or effort required to complete it. Hence, leading to ineffective outlines of project progress. This further potentially masks critical issues and hinders project management efforts.
Project management tools address this by providing task management features with customizable boards and views, allowing you to assign varying weights and priorities to tasks. This approach ensures a more accurate reflection of project status and helps in identifying bottlenecks before they escalate.
As a result, the burndown chart is not a reliable metric engineering leaders can solely trust. It is always better to complement it with sprint analysis tools to provide additional insights tailored to agile project management. A few of the reasons are stated below:
Moreover, these tools often support collaboration features, such as built-in chat and video meetings, keeping all communication linked to tasks and ensuring transparency across the team. With mobile and remote access capabilities, they enable project management on the go, maintaining team alignment whether you're in the office or working remotely.
Typo’s sprint analysis feature allows engineering leaders to track and analyze their team’s progress throughout a sprint. It uses data from Git and the issue management tool to provide insights into getting insights on how much work has been completed, how much work is still in progress, and how much time is left in the sprint hence, identifying any potential problems early on and taking corrective action.
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