In “Getting out of the Quagmire of Task Management and embracing the Gantt Chart,” I talked about using gantt charts to plan tasks. Gantt charts focus more on the progress of each task. So if I want to know the overall progress of the project, what should I choose? That’s where another simple and powerful tool comes in: the Burn down Chart.
What is burnout diagram
Assume that project X has 5 tasks. When we estimate these tasks, the schedule is as follows:
| The project name | Estimated time (hours) |
|---|---|
| Task 1 | 5 |
| Task 2 | 6 |
| Task 3 | 7 |
| Task 4 | 4 |
| Task 5 | 3 |
This task is expected to take 25 hours to complete. Considering that various emergencies may need to be dealt with to leave time for maneuver, THEREFORE, I need to complete this project within 7 days. The project time is set as: December 1, 2018 to December 7, 2018.
In a very ideal situation, the work time is evenly divided, and by the end of the business day on December 7, 2018, the work is just finished. The time consumption at this time is drawn as a broken line graph as shown in the figure below.
The y-coordinate is the remaining time of the task, the y-coordinate is the date,
However, in practice, some tasks may be completed ahead of schedule and some tasks may need to be delayed. The actual line graph of remaining time and date may be shown in the orange curve below.
This is the burnout diagram. It’s very simple and very intuitive.
From the burnout diagram, we can see that from December 1, 2018 to December 5, 2018, our development progress was ahead of the plan, and it seems that the task should be completed ahead of schedule. The more negative and steeper the slope of orange curve is, the more ahead the actual development progress is. However, from December 03, 2018, the development speed declined, and by December 06, 2018, the progress and the expected time coincided. By December 7, 2018, the development progress was behind expectations and the task could not be completed as scheduled.
Let’s look at a few more examples:
- Finish tasks on time:
- Finish tasks ahead of schedule
- Not completing the task
- Early lag behind the progress, late speed up to catch up
How to draw burnout chart
Burnout chart is a concept in agile development and can be generated in many project management systems of agile development. Because burnout charts are very simple, they can be generated with a little effort using Excel’s built-in drawing function.
In order to improve the efficiency of my daily office work with Python, I used macOS’s numbers table tool + Python to generate a burn out chart. Of course, you can do it in Excel. The table is used to record the remaining time of the task, and Python is used to format the task time and generate a burn out diagram.
Specification for filling in forms
The table is as follows:
Where the first row of the table is the task name and the first column is the date. The number in the middle of the form indicates the remaining time of the task. The rules for completing the form are as follows:
- A blank field indicates that the task was not done that day.
- If a field is 0, the task is complete.
- A number greater than 0 represents the time remaining in the task.
- You don’t need to fill in dates that didn’t happen in advance. For example, the task schedule is 2018-12-01 to 2018-12-07, and today is 2018-12-06, so there is no need to fill in the line 2018-12-07 in advance.
- Please sort by date, do not scramble the date.
Analysis program instructions
Once you’ve filled out the form, save it as an XLSX file in Excel. Assumes that the path is: / Users/kingname/Desktop/test. The XLSX (or stored in the Windows system: D: \ work \ test XLSX).
Use Jupyter in Anaconda to open the ipynb file of the analysis program, as shown below:
You only need to modify the contents inside the single quotation marks in the three lines. The rest of the data does not need to be modified.
After the modification is complete, click kernel-restart & Run All on the toolbar, as shown in the figure below.
Wait 2 seconds, and the burnout chart will appear at the bottom of the page. As shown in the figure below.
Get Excel templates and source code
Excel and ipynb file address: github.com/kingname/Au…
Use Jupyter to open the IPynb file to see the analysis program.
P.S.
If you don’t know what Jupyter is or you don’t have any programming background but would like to try out some burn out diagrams then you can leave them in the comments and I will show you how to use Jupyter.