It's pointless gimmicky make-work that presents your upper management with the fantasy that development work is not a difficult bespoke engineering effort, but rather an assembly line like they studied at business school.
In order to pull off this sleight of hand, real work is broken up into elastically-sized multiples of a subjective metric called "points" which the team is allowed to estimate. This estimation game is key as it builds buy-in from the team by appearing to "give them a seat at the table." Chunking the estimations into sprints is a smoke screen to keep the scam going.
Having acquired the buy-in from the people actually doing the work, the estimates are immediately converted to commitments by tracking progress on a burn down chart and telling upper management that the project will begin at 100% work remaining and proceed in a steady, linear assembly line fashion to 0% work remaining after the time allotted.
Deviations from a steady downward slope are interpreted as failures of the development team which paradoxically reinforces the standing of the chart presenter because they are able to "show the numbers". Unchecked, this ultimately elevates them to diety-like cult standing.
As the flawed assumptions underlying the chart are never questioned after the initial implementation, the use of burn down charts ultimately ends with:
- Blue Pill Ending: the company shoots itself in the foot by firing the team for failing to make the burn-down chart linear
- Seller's Market Ending: the team gets wise to the con and leaves the company
- Red Pill Ending: the process manager is fired after heroic intervention by the technical leadership
A process manager that wants to show up with their PMI certification and their burn-down charts faces a precarious end-game.
In order to pull off this sleight of hand, real work is broken up into elastically-sized multiples of a subjective metric called "points" which the team is allowed to estimate. This estimation game is key as it builds buy-in from the team by appearing to "give them a seat at the table." Chunking the estimations into sprints is a smoke screen to keep the scam going.
Having acquired the buy-in from the people actually doing the work, the estimates are immediately converted to commitments by tracking progress on a burn down chart and telling upper management that the project will begin at 100% work remaining and proceed in a steady, linear assembly line fashion to 0% work remaining after the time allotted.
Deviations from a steady downward slope are interpreted as failures of the development team which paradoxically reinforces the standing of the chart presenter because they are able to "show the numbers". Unchecked, this ultimately elevates them to diety-like cult standing.
As the flawed assumptions underlying the chart are never questioned after the initial implementation, the use of burn down charts ultimately ends with:
- Blue Pill Ending: the company shoots itself in the foot by firing the team for failing to make the burn-down chart linear
- Seller's Market Ending: the team gets wise to the con and leaves the company
- Red Pill Ending: the process manager is fired after heroic intervention by the technical leadership
A process manager that wants to show up with their PMI certification and their burn-down charts faces a precarious end-game.