A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal.

John Rusk describes how they work in his post – Agile Charts - which is over 6 years old, but still up to date today. Now, not everyone likes burn down graphs - they do have some very definite limitations. In Milestone Planner, Milestones have a status beyond just completed or open, and as we are tracking an entire project, so we have to deal with things like changes in scope (adding and removing milestones), and down the line, we also want to show the earned-value in the project (see “Earned-value and Burn Charts” by Alistair Cockburn).

Burn-up charts are the mirror image of burn-down charts, and are much better suited for charting the progress of an entire project. As the name implies, they are line an upside down version of a burn-down graph. Being the other way up let’s them display different types of status, and any changes in scope show up as changes on the top line. If you are interested, you can get more of an idea about how they compare by reading David Anderson’s “Managing with Cumulative Flow Diagrams“, or see how burn-up charts can be used to show bottlenecks in  Juurgen Appelo’s take. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an example of a burn-up graph from Milestone Planner (we call it a progress graph – didn’t wan’t to get the health and safety folk all hot under the collar with talk of fires):

But the image is only part of the picture, as it were (not doing so well with metaphors today). From left to right, we can see how the project suddenly grows in scope (number of milestones) half way through, and we can see a steady difference between work completed, in blue, and the target completion, shown as ‘missed’ in light blue. But because we track the full history of the plan, we can also show how these estimates have changed over the course of the project. Watch this video from Jim to see what we mean:

Slightly mind bending stuff, but we hope, after a little explanation, that it makes sense. As ever, the best way is to dive in and try it for yourself. You’ll need to run your project for a few weeks to really see how the progress graph works. We hope that it gives you a better view of how your project is going, and helps you stay on track!

We’ve found that much of the trick of successful project management is helping people to make clear commitments, which are visible to the entire team, and then doing everything you can to help them achieve that.

One of the simplest ways to make commitments and progress visible is schedule regular time to review these with the team.

Assuming that you’ll be meeting weekly, there are three questions you need to address at that weekly review…

• What did we plan to do this week?
• What actually happened this week?
• What re-planning is required to take account of this weeks events?

So to prepare for the weekly meeting, list each of the key milestones and actions that the team agreed to deliver in the last seven days, and get updates from each of the team members on the status of each of these (you can do this in the meeting, but its a much better use of time to begin the meeting with all of the facts already documented). Use the time in the meeting to address the “why’s” of any issues, then move onto re-planning where you need to and setting out the key milestones and action for the next seven days.

Of course. if you are using milestone planner with your team then we’ve already done all of the meeting preparation for you. If you make sure you and your team update actions and milestones as they happen, then you’ll find an up-to-date weekly report under the ‘review’ tab for your plan. It contains all of the facts you’ll need to run a really effective weekly team get together…. if you want to send the info out in advance then theres an option to automatically generate a pdf document which you can send out to your team.

So if you want to help your team get more done and be super organised get those weekly sessions in the diary today.

The first approach is where someone locks themselves in a darkened room with some ‘gantt chart software’… they think about the sequence of tasks; they phone people up and say “how long will it take to make a “; they work out all of the intricate dependencies. Some time later they emerge with a massive file of paperwork which contains ‘the plan’.

The second approach is where a team get together in a room and work out what needs to be delivered, roughly when things are required and who is going to get on and do them. Usually there is lots of scribbling on whiteboards – the plan may not be nicely wrapped up in a document, but is more likely a collection of phone-snapped pictures of flipcharts and whiteboards.

So which one is best?

Of course, the answer is… it depends.

Next time you need to make a plan answer these two questions…

* Can I precisely describe the ‘thing’ this project is meant to deliver?
* Have the people I’ll be working with delivered one of these ‘things’ before?

If the answer is a resounding YES to both of these then you can stop reading now – go and find a darkened room and start making gantt charts.

If you’re not so sure you can answer yes to both of these questions, then its time to book a meeting room…

Here are four questions to tackle with your team. Don’t worry about getting them exactly right first time – it may take a few iterations before things become completely clear.

Why is this thing so important that we going to spend lots of time, energy and money on delivering it?

Sometimes grown-up organisations call this ‘The Business Case’ and make you jump through all sorts of hoops to have it ‘approved’. However, the real reason for answering this question is that it starts to shape the approach you are going to take to the project. Are you going to go out of business if you don’t deliver? Will doing this increase the number of customers you have? Will it reduce costs? Will it be fun and exciting? etc

How will we know when the ‘thing’ is finished?

This one needs some imagination, but its important. By working out – if you like – the ‘test criteria’ for your project you are moving toward defining the outcome (which is a handy thing to know). So it could be… “at the end of the project we’ll count the number of widgets we make per day and that number will be twice as big as it is now” or “we’ll have released a new version of our software to all our customers with no additional calls to our support centre”… and/or “our boss will be so delighted that we’ll all be taken out for a massive celebratory dinner”

What are the smaller ‘things’ that we know we need to finish the bigger ‘thing’ AND Who is going to get/buy/make each of the ‘things’ by when?

OK its a big long question, but this is the one that’s going to make stuff happen. Break the project down into chunks. If you don’t know what all the chunks are right now, then at least you’ll identify some things that you can get on with while you are working out what the rest of the chunks are. For each chunk have an initial stab at who is going to be delivering it and when it’s going to be needed by. Don’t worry too much about getting dates right first time – as your plan starts to take shape you’ll want to shuffle dates around anyway.

Write this up somewhere – a flipchart or whiteboard with post-its that you can move around will work. Even better (and here’s a plug) use Milestone Planner with a projector and start putting each of the chunks on the timeline as Milestones. With everyone looking at the same screen its then easy to assign people to milestones and move things around on the timeline as you work out what needs to happen. (As a bonus, at at the end of the meeting, Milestone Planner can send you a pic of your plan which you can then circulate to everyone so that everyone stays on the same page !!)

What are we going to do when stuff goes wrong?

Anyone who thinks that reality will pan out exactly like the plan is kidding themselves. Use some of your workshop time to ask ‘What if…?’ type questions. Try and get a feel for where the risky areas of the project might be and start to work out what your response might be.

Wrapping Up

Its important to document the answers you got to… and agree what the next steps are.

If you’re lucky and you’ve got to the point where all the answers are clear you might want to ‘write it up’ into some impressive document. If things are still fluid then it might be better just to take lots of photo’s of the flipcharts and whiteboards and send them around to everyone. Of course if you’ve used Milestone Planner you could just invite everyone to the plan and ask them to update their milestones as they work on them!

Making Plans... Benjamin and Jim

OK. Draw a square. Now draw a triangle on top of the square. On the right hand side of the triangle, just on top, draw a rectangle. Now inside the first square you drew draw four other squares – but make sure they don’t touch each other, or the edges of the first square. In the bottom middle of the first square draw a rectangle, taller than it is wide. Pop a little circle half way up on the right hand side of the rectangle.

Done that?

What have you drawn?

Here’s the alternative, simpler and more effective way of doing it: Make me a picture of a house.

We’ve done this exercise countless times with people we’ve worked with over the years. Usually, out of a group of 10 people, maybe 2 or 3 will follow the first set of instructions and produce something that looks like a house. Most people follow the instructions to the letter, but don’t produce a picture that looks like anything recognisable. Clearly it’s not because they couldn’t draw a house… it’s because the instructions are ambiguous.

OK, so it’s a trivial example, but it has important implications for planning.

When you are building a plan you can choose to describe the journey in terms of ‘activities’ or ‘outcomes’.
Activity based plans are like the first set of house drawing instructions. You start at the beginning and work out the set of tasks that need to be done to achieve the end result. If you are really keen you might even draw out all of the activities on a Gantt chart, or issue people with a spreadsheet stuffed with tasks.

Outcome based plans are like the second statement. They start by describing the end result that you want to achieve and the key outcomes you expect along the way. The individual steps that you need to take to get there are left up to the person who is responsible for producing the output.

In our experience Outcome based plans win almost every time because…

• Everyone knows what the target looks like. With the simple set of instructions above, our experience is that they only result in a recognisable picture of a house around 30% of the time. For the person who wrote the instructions it was obvious that it was going to be a house, because that was the picture they had in their mind, but when you have to work out the goal from the instructions its much harder. When you plan using activities and tasks its really easy to think you have completely described what needs to be done, but its really really hard to actually (I’d argue impossible) to build a completely infallible plan. By describing a set of Milestone outcomes that need to be achieved along the way, everyone can understand what the goal is and you don’t just rely on your ‘instructions’ being interpreted correctly.

• The team can find creative solutions and different routes to the goal. When you plan using activities and tasks you map out a single route to the goal. There may be countless other ways to get there. People in your team will have their own experiences and ideas which will lead to better solutions. But, if you constrain people to a set of tasks you lose all of that. This especially important when things go wrong (and who has ever worked on a project where there wasn’t at least on slip up). If you define the outcomes, when things go wrong you give people the freedom to think on their feet and change the tasks they do to cope with the new situation. If you are in ‘task-world’ when things go wrong, everything has to stop while you define the new set of instructions.

• You can measure progress by Outcome Milestones achieved, rather than by the amount of work done. If you tried to follow the first set of instructions above you would have no idea of how close you were to actually producing the intended result. You could have measured how far through the set of instructions you were, but that’s about it. Having done 100% of the work means nothing unless you have produced 100% of the intended outcome. By tracking against Milestones which are tied to outcomes you know that every time you complete one you have made tangible progress towards your goal.

In essence if you communicate what the goal is, the tasks will choose themselves. If you just tell people what tasks to do, you risk missing the goal completely. Its why we built Milestone Planner to be outcome focussed. Each Milestone in the plan is a tangible outcome. When you share your plan with your team everyone can see what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by and who is responsible for it. That’s what Milestone Planner is all about.

1. Create a plan!

Plans are a great statement of intent. They provide something to benchmark progress against. No plan, no benchmark. So, sign up at milestoneplanner.com if you haven’t already (A trial account is free, and will last you through the year). You’ll have a blank project plan waiting when you sign in. If you are already signed up, just login and go to projects, then click the button to create a new plan.

2. Map Out Your Roles and Responsibilities.

To make some sense of your goals I suggest dividing them up. There are a number of ways to do this:

• By role – e.g. Father, Musician, Husband, etc…
• By area or domain – e.g. Family, Job, Community, …
• By theme – e.g. Health, Wealth, Social, …

Simply create a workstream for each role or area – you’ll be prompted for the first one, or click “add a workstream”. After you’re done, you’ll have some horizontal groupings with spaces ready to add your goals for the year. If you aren’t sure which approach to take, try a couple and see which one works best. It is easy to delete workstreams – just click on their title.

3. It’s a Whole Year!

Think marathon, not sprint. You don’t need to achieve everything in January, but you also don’t want to leave everything until December. At the top left of the screen, by the project name, click edit and change the project start date to 01/2010, change the end date to 01/2011 – you might want to give it a sensible name at the same time. There, the plan is now a year long. Thats a good few hundred days to spread things out over, but first…

4. Begin With the End in Mind.

To borrow a Covey phrase, begin with the end in mind. Scroll right to the end of the plan. Think about the end of December 2010. What would you like to have achieved in each of the areas you’ve defined? Click on the time line and create a goal, or two if you need to, in each workstream. Capture your thoughts and go for big, but specific goals. More than seven workstreams with more than one or two goals in each is probably biting off too much, but you know yourself. Choose what you think will work. Remember, you can always update the milestones and add or remove workstreams later – this is an emergent strategic plan.

5. Work Backwards – Little by Little.

Now, zoom out and look at the year. Thinking about those end goals, what the smaller milestones on the way towards them that you can achieve throughout the course of the year? If I wanted to play live in a band at a local music venue by the end of the year, I can think backwards: “Rehearse a full set” – I’ll put that in at the end of October. “Choose and learn 12 songs” – I’ll put that in at the end of July. And so on. I might start with “Guitarist Recruited” in February. You hopefully get the idea.

Take those big end-of-year goals (you might want to change them to yellow or red to mark them out – just click on them) and break them down into smaller goals. Look up and down the plan at the milestones in each of the different streams – are there any opportunities for synergies? If I had a goal around more time with the family, I might want to have them in the band. Of course the rule for truly realising synergies is to avoid compromises, so you might want to leave that one.. In all seriousness, it is interesting how a personal plan starts to mesh together when you look at it this way. Sometimes the opposite happens too – you spot areas of your life that really aren’t fitting in. This might be a time to tweak some ‘big’ things.

6. Sleep on it…

With your first cut of the plan done, take one last look at it, then log out. Let the sun go down and them come up again. Let your brain digest all of those thoughts you’ve just had. Now, login and look at the plan. Does it still make sense? Can some of the milestones be better defined, or rearranged? Drag things around until it is right.

7. Share Your Plan.

This might not be for everyone, but if you have a trusted friend or partner, you might want to share the plan with them (it’s simple to add them – just click on ‘people’ and enter their name and email address). Having someone else look at your plan can help in a number of ways:

• An independent set of eyes see what you might miss. It is good to be challenged.
• Sharing your plan creates a sense of accountability and motivation to achieve it.
• A shared load… Having someone who will cheer you on is good when things get tough.

Of course, you might feel your plan is too personal to share, and that’s fine. I’d ask yourself why you aren’t comfortable sharing it – the answer to that question is surprisingly full of useful insight.

8. Live the Plan!

Now live the plan! Email yourself a copy and print it out and put it somewhere you’ll see it. Come back and login to the plan – I’d say once a week. Look at the upcoming milestones and watch the red “today” line mark your way through the year . Mark each milestone done as you achieve it, and update goals and milestones if things have evolved during the year.

2010 – Have a good one!

The hub model has the appearance of a safe, controlled, well-managed process. The reality is that it leads to people making decisions on in-accurate information, and at the speed of one bottle neck. Of course, there is a different way to do things.

The mesh model is peer-to-peer. Anyone can interact directly with anyone else. In the case of Milestone Planner, this means that anyone in the project team can go and update their milestone directly, and see the most up to date version of the plan. No trawling through emails or folders trying to find the latest-latest version.

It is a person-to-person form of management and communication (something that Scott Gould of Likeminds is blogging a fair bit about – Becoming P2P), and based on an “adult-adult” communication model, rather than the less productive “adult-child” one that so often accompanies the hub/star model. We’re aiming to make Milestone planner a grown up tool, for grown up people.

Let us know what you think.