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Beyond Burnups
The different ways to forecast delivery (and when to use them)
What You'll Learn
- Why burnup charts create false certainty, and what they get wrong
- How to run Monte Carlo simulation properly, including where "just use Monte Carlo" breaks down with feature WIP and dependencies
- How to forecast across a single team, multiple features, and multi-team initiatives with dependencies
- Real examples and free, ready-to-use tools, rather than just theory
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About
About the Book
Learn to forecast delivery with evidence, not hope
Too many organisations still forecast delivery with a straight line and a hope, extending an average forward and presenting the intersection point as though it were a fact rather than a guess. Burnup charts are familiar, easy to build, and trusted by almost every agile team. They are also quietly misleading, compressing variability into a single mean and presenting one outcome as though it were representative of every possible future.
Beyond Burnups cuts through that false certainty, but it doesn't stop at "just run a Monte Carlo simulation" either. Feature WIP and cross-team dependencies quietly break the simplistic version of that advice, which is why this book matches the forecasting technique to the actual shape of your work, whether that's a single team, a team juggling multiple features, or an initiative spanning several teams with dependencies between them.
Drawing on years of hands-on delivery and coaching experience, Nicolas Brown goes beyond the theory of Monte Carlo simulation to show what actually works in practice, and what still trips teams up. This book is for delivery leads, product managers, PMOs, and leaders who are tired of forecasts that feel more hopeful than accurate, and want honest, defensible answers to "when will it be done".
Praise for Beyond Burnups
"Beyond Burnups is a quick, sharp, and essential read for anyone responsible for shipping software. With its help, you can shift delivery from hopeful guesswork to honest, probabilistic decision-making."
Steve Pereira, author of Flow Engineering
"You'll never look at a burndown chart the same way again."
Benjamin Richards, Systems Coach at KFC and Team Topologies Advocate
"Beyond Burnups takes you on a journey from legacy burnup charts to multi-team Monte Carlo, AI (naturally) and how we should consider the use of probabilistic forecasting for expected value generation. It is a must read for anyone serious about modern day software delivery."
Ravi Nar, CTO at Student.com
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Author
About the Author
Nicolas Brown
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.
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