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

This is the re-scheduled session with Nick Brown.

About the Talk
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.

You’ll leave this session with clear approaches to:
● 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
Nick is a seasoned agility and product consultant with a career spanning eCommerce, financial services, and professional services. He’s led on the adoption of agility at companies like PwC, Nationwide, Royal Mail and ASOS, focusing on ways of working, product thinking, and organisational flow. Currently, he works as a Principal Flow Consultant at Thrivve Partners, helping teams build great digital products, fast.
Nick is incredibly passionate about agility, product, and data, and builds open-source tools that make life easier for teams using Jira and Azure DevOps.

Nick has also published a book. You can find more details here: https://www.nicolasbrown.co.uk/book