While a project manager typically ensures that progress flows steadily, sometimes his role becomes the opposite—to disrupt. When progress starts lagging behind schedule, a good project manager knows when it’s time to stop reeling it in and potentially recalibrate.
When deadlines loom and milestones start slipping, your team’s goals and commitments will depend on your ability to recognize moments to take action. This is part art and part science. You’ll need good judgment and experience, but more importantly, you’ll need data. And one valuable tool that provides crucial indicators for appropriate disruption is the burndown chart.
What is a Burndown Chart?
A burndown chart (also called a sprint burndown chart in Agile) is a graph that shows how much work remains in your sprint at any given moment.
Source: Unichrone.
A “healthy” burndown chart typically shows a diagonal downward slope. This indicates that as the sprint progresses, tasks or story points are being finished steadily, and the team is fulfilling their sprint goals in good time.
In a real project scenario, though, this is rarely the case. Tasks get checked off, but rarely at an equal rate. Sometimes, new tasks get added due to additional scope, unforeseen issues, or underestimated tasks.
Each point in your burndown chart, whether upward or downward, provides important information about your team’s progress. This can be useful in making decisions or in reporting to stakeholders.
Uses of a Burndown Chart
Visual Representation of Remaining Work
While the remaining work can be found in a task list, the burndown chart can communicate the pulse of your project at a glance. A quick look at the downward slope doesn’t just show progress; it can light up team morale when things are on track or serve as an early warning system when they’re not. Rather than evaluate this in minutes, this tool consolidates key information to help project managers identify potential issues in seconds.
Emergency Response Indicator
Remember how we talked about disruption being necessary sometimes? Here’s where burndown charts shine. As a project manager, you can use it to track productivity and forecast when your tasks will actually finish, not just when you hope they will. So when you’re halfway into your sprint timeline but your burndown chart doesn’t show a promising angle, that’s your signal to shake things up and potentially initiate emergency procedures, especially when critical milestones are at stake.
Team Velocity
Your team’s velocity is the measure of how quickly work gets completed, typically in story points or tasks per sprint. Burndown charts naturally display this information, giving you concrete data rather than gut feelings about performance. This becomes incredibly useful when reporting progress to stakeholders or planning your next sprint, as it eliminates guesswork about what your team can realistically accomplish.
How to Read a Burndown Chart
Let’s break down the burndown chart in Agile so you can read and use it in your workflow.
X and Y Axis: Your Project’s Coordinates
Every burndown chart has two simple dimensions:
- X-axis: Project timeline, stretches from day one to the end of the sprint or project schedule
- Y-axis: Remaining work to be done, typically measured in tasks or story points
Your burndown chart is like a countdown timer paired with a task counter, working together to tell your project’s story.
Ideal Work Line: The Perfect Work Scenario
The ideal work line is a crisp diagonal line that slices through your chart. As we’ve discussed, it shows what it’s like when tasks get completed at a steady, consistent pace, every single day.
While we know that this rarely happens in real life, your ideal work line serves as an important reference point to help project managers gauge whether the team is cruising along nicely or if there is a need to ramp things up.
Actual Work Lines: Reality in Action
As the team progresses, you’ll plot points on your burndown chart representing the remaining work. Connecting the dots will show you your actual work line—an indicator of how things are actually progressing.
Here’s where the magic happens: Compare your actual line with your ideal line. Is your actual line floating above it, or is it dipping below?
If your actual work line is above your ideal line, it means that you’re making progress slower than initially planned. Alternatively, if your actual work line is below your ideal work line, it means you’re ahead of schedule. This simple visual comparison tells you exactly where you stand without having to look into endless status reports.
How to Use the Burn Chart in Workamajig
Workamajig, the best project management tool for creative teams, allows you to take advantage of a burn chart variation right from your project dashboard.
The Workamajig Burn chart is helpful for seeing how the project is doing based on the actual hours entered each week in comparison to the allocated hours in the scheduled duration.
Getting Started: Enabling the Feature
- From your project dashboard, click the “...more” option
- Select “System Settings.”
- Check “Burn Chart”
- Hit “SAVE.”
- Refresh your browser tab or reopen the project dashboard
To access the chart, simply scroll down the project details on the left side of your Workamajig interface and click “Burn Chart” to view your data.
Reading Your Workamajig Burndown Chart
Your burndown chart displays weekly data in two helpful ways:
- Hours tab: Compares your allocated hours against actual hours entered
- Financial tab: Shows the gross financial value of planned hours versus actual time logged
Both tabs tell the same story from different angles –if one shows you’re trending over, the other likely will do.
The blue and red dots represent your actual work line and your projected allocations, respectively.
Clicking on any dot on the chart will give you a more detailed breakdown of how each week’s hours contribute to the overall picture, helping you identify specific areas that might need attention.
Pro Tip: For the most accurate picture, use “Pull From Schedule” from your estimates to keep budgets, allocations, and actuals aligned.
Wrapping Up
Burndown charts represent your project’s pulse, constantly communicating critical information about the health, progress, and potential issues. Whether you’re racing to meet a deadline or trying to optimize your team’s workflow, Workamajig’s burndown chart feature can transform complex project data into actionable insights. It empowers you to know exactly when to maintain steady progress and when to strategically disrupt and accelerate.
By integrating this tool into your workflow, you’ll develop a sixth sense for project trends, build more accurate forecasts, and ultimately, deliver more successful outcomes.