Beyond burnups: the different ways to forecast delivery (and when to use them)

Burnup and burndown charts have been the default way teams forecast delivery for decades. But in modern software/product development, with high variability, multi-team initiatives, and shifting scope, these deterministic charts give a false sense of certainty and,

at best, a 50% chance of being right.

In this talk, I’ll walk through evidence from real teams that supports this claim and show why probabilistic methods offer far more reliable forecasts.

We’ll then go further. Even the standard probabilistic questions of “When will it be done?” or “What will we get?” fall apart in most organisations because they assume teams work on one “thing” at a time. I’ll introduce more advanced approaches that model feature-level WIP, multi-team scenarios, cumulative probability, and dependencies. All of which will draw on real examples and the free tools available (which you can use too!) to help teams forecast with confidence.

Participant takeaways:

• Understanding why burnups/burndowns continually mislead in complex environments
• How probabilistic forecasting works - from simple Monte Carlo through to multi-team
  and dependency-aware approaches
• How to assess whether your input data is reliable enough to forecast with
• How to communicate delivery forecasts using ranges and likelihoods, not false
  certainty
• How to get started with the (free) tools available

About the Speaker
Nicolas Brown is a product and agility consultant specialising in flow and data, dedicated to helping organisations and teams focus on outcomes via a principle based approach when adopting new ways of working.
He’s incredibly passionate about data and telemetry generated by teams and using this for a data-driven approach when it comes to coaching at all levels of the organisation.
He is the author of the book, Real World Agility as well as the creator of many open source templates available on GitHub.
Linkedin | Website
Pronouns: He/Him

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81580002661?pwd=tgIO1FR7HW38hprq15I6GCln1LS9ki.1
Meeting ID: 815 8000 2661
Passcode: 558483
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