Backlogs and Burndowns: An Alternative to Gantt Charts for Planning Product Development Projects

Featuring Kelly Weyrauch - March 20, 2018

Overview

Gantt Charts are a fine mechanism for planning projects that have well bounded activities with a clean start and end point, and with understood dependencies and sequences. But in the non-linear, sometimes chaotic world of Product Development, Gantt Charts can be inadequate, cumbersome, or even misleadingly inaccurate. In the session, we will explore an alternative using mechanism of Agile product development - a Backlog of value to deliver with estimations of size (effort) and a reality-based Burndown that shows a plan with visible assumptions. Together these mechanism provide an effective way to plan, track, and replan a complex Product Development effort.

Learning Objectives

Gantt Charts are a fine mechanism for planning projects that have well bounded activities with a clean start and end point, and with understood dependencies and sequences. But in the non-linear, sometimes chaotic world of Product Development, Gantt Charts can be inadequate, cumbersome, or even misleadingly inaccurate. In the session, we will explore an alternative using mechanism of Agile product development - a Backlog of value to deliver with estimations of size (effort) and a reality-based Burndown that shows a plan with visible assumptions. Together these mechanism provide an effective way to plan, track, and replan a complex Product Development effort.

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