Burn Up Chart Generation
One embodiment of what is commonly known as a “burn up” chart is a comparison of the estimated times to complete a series of tasks with the actual time it takes to complete them. This is generally displayed graphically as a line chart where the vertical axis is the extent of task completion (in this case, Number of Tasks Completed) and the horizontal access is time.
Our client in this case was a manufacturing company that performed testing on a variety of subsystem components. Ultimately, several different organizations were required to give their approval before final shipping to the customer. These charts were used in daily briefings to report and discuss progress on the tasks (planned versus actual). Current practice involved time-consuming, hand-construction of these charts each morning. The client asked us if there was a way to save time on this repetitive process.
We designed and implemented a simple Excel-based tool that would automate this repetitive process. Dates for each task were pulled from their project management system, and input into a simple Excel spreadsheet table. The burn up charts for each subsystem would pull the dates directly from this table, create a series of Pivot Tables on the fly, and graph the resulting data in the desired burn up chart format. An additional VBA script would copy this chart into a PowerPoint file for presentation. Hence, the burn up chart could be created with almost immediate applicability, depending on how often the project file was updated. The video below shows how this tool operates.