I have considered the secondary axis thing. Then all the issues of axis scale etc. seemed like a headache. Assuming the weekly productivity is prettymuch same, then excel quickly shows very tall bars (and adjusts the max accordingly). This creates an annoying effect. But may be for a given project we can find the usual pattern and set the axis max accordingly.

“Your burn down approach is most valuable if all of your deliverables are relatively equal in size/complexity. ”

I agree. It is better to chunk work in to meaningful portions and then make the chart. If the portions (or deliverables) are not equal, we can consider adding one more column where we can compute burn down units based on the weightage of individual items.

Usually burn down charts work well for function point based estimate. The more complicated a function or deliverable is, the more function points it will have.

“One other thought. If I were your customer, I’d be asking for a revised plan based on actuals to date to understand whether you think you’re going to get back on track or not. To do that, you’d need another column to plot. The original plan could be captured in a new column (”Baseline”) and the planned column could be updated with the new forecast.”

Hmm… I thought Planned is supposed to convey that. If there is more than one version of plan, it is likely that the manager is interested in the deviation wrt latest plan. Everything else is sunk cost.

That said, we can easily add one more line to this chart with “original plan” values and color it differently.

Your burn down approach is most valuable if all of your deliverables are relatively equal in size/complexity. In your example chart, although you’re currently behind, it looks as though you’ll be catching up quickly with the recent acceleration in delivery. If the delay was caused by tackling the larger/more complex deliverables first, I’ll have a lot of faith that you can catch up to plan quickly. On the other hand, if you’ve only completed small/simple deliverables, then I doubt you’re going to get back on schedule.

But that gets in to more complicated earned value analysis…and the whole point of this was to do something quick and easy. I think the payback/effort is well worth it in this case and is a good balance to the hours being charged to your project against deliverables being produced.

One final comment…did you consider putting the Daily Completed bar chart on a secondary axis? Since daily volume is plotted against the total volume, it’s always going to be difficult to see low volume days.