Key 8 - Actual End Date: Michigan Agile Philosophy (MAP) Project Key

8.  Actual End Date
Let’s see…we can look at this one in two different ways.  There’s the literal definition where we look into the past, and there’s more of a predictive definition.  Let’s start with the literal definition.  This is a moment in time.  When did you have your first kid?  When was the Big Game?  When did you graduate?  Each of these have a definite point in time that you can point to after they happened.  This is kinda useful.  It tells us things like how old your kid is, how long since your glory days, and so on.  Really though, it’s more interesting to chase after the second more predictive definition.

This one is more like asking when the milk will spoil.  The date on the jug says March 1^st, but in reality it could be a few days after or less likely a few days before.  Another example could be asking a pregnant woman when she is due.  We have an idea based on experience, but in reality, the actual date could be before or after the predicted date.  Ok, enough of the metaphors.  In practice it looks a lot like the MVP burn up chart was saw last time.  In the pictures below you see the black line which denotes done done for the project.  This means all the intended stories are complete.  This represents all the release stories in the backlog.  You may have some additional work in there that you are planning for another release, but we won’t concern ourselves with that for now.  The first picture shows the best case scenario, the green line as it crosses the black “done” line.

This is telling us that in the best case scenario the project will complete on 3/17/2014.  This is good info, but it only part of the story.  This means that if the team rocks at their best rate, they will finish on that date.  As everyone has probably heard me say by now, “a plan is only as good as first contact with the enemy.”  In other words, stuff is going to come up that is unexpected.  

In this second picture you can see when the project will finish in the average case.  That means that the likely ending is 3/24/2013.  If the team works about how they have been working, they should finish right around that date.

Finally we have the worst case example.  This means that from today on if the team completes their work at a rate equivalent to their worst, they will finish on 4/7/2013. 

At the end of the day with this burn up chart, we get guide rails.  The project will be done between and 3/17/2013 and 4/7/2013.  When you think about it the spread isn’t that crazy.  It’s only a few weeks, but at least it paints a pretty good picture.  We aren’t just pulling dates out of thin air.  Lots of bad things happen when we do that.  Most often it involves people working crazy hours right up until the due date.  This hurts morale, kills productivity, and if you really look at it, that date probably was an artificial date anyway.