Burn Down Graph and Project requirements reporting

We're using Wrike to manage quite complex projects (hundreds of tasks, divided in sprints) and we're struggling to produce good project reporting out of Wrike.

In particular, we feel the lack of a Burn Down Graph, showing you the actual progress of tasks (belonging to a specific folder) versus the estimated planned completion. Here is an example of what I'm speaking of. The vertical axis is expressing the number of remaining tasks, while the horizontal axis is the time interval of the project. The Blue line is the planned burn down of the tasks, while the Red line is indicating the actual performance.

Besides, it would also be useful to establish a relationship among tasks and project requirements and track the completion of the latter. For example, if I have 20 tasks required to achieve a specific project requirement, it would be nice to "tag" them all together to that requirement (through a custom property or a milestone or a folder, I don't know which best suites) and get a report about the percentage of completion of the requirement itself, calculated from the overall completion of all tasks linked to it.

Thank you in advance for your attention.

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Status: Launched

Comments

Permanently deleted user

I can see Stephanie was chatting about this in your post in the 'How To' section. Anyone else reading this who are interested in seeing something similar please vote on this post and also check out Marco's and Stephanie's conversation here.

Our Product Team are reviewing Burn Down Charts for Reports but its early days and we have no specific details to share right now. Currently using Project Statuses allows you to review the stages a Project is in can be a good indicator to show where a Project currently stands.

In terms of looking at the planned vs actual scheduling of tasks, the baseline chat is a useful view to see this information to keep you informed about how planned tasks may have changed during the Project.

Thanks for posting Marco!

MC Carter

This type of graph would be a great addition to Wrike reports. Such an easy way to see if things are getting done consistently to schedule.

James Leach

Does anyone know if this is in the works for Wrike?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hey guys, I have an update for you - Baselines in Gantt Chart are now in Wrike Labs. A baseline lets you compare your project's current schedule to the schedule it had on a particular date in the past. Hope it helps 🙂

Trevor Coyle

I reviewed the software today and was in aww at the endless applications I can think of using it for BUT - In the absence of the burndown its not even an option for me. Very disappointing, good luck on future updates Wrike team.

Marco Caciotti

A year has passed since we started using Wrike and no significant improvements have been made to manage projects.
The tool is and remains a good collaboration tool, but it is not suitable for managing complex projects or applying structured management methodologies (whether they are Scrum or more traditional). If this is your need, you have to look elsewhere, unfortunately.

Nick Carlino

Just adding that burn-up charts would be very useful, not only burn down.

Paul Kemp

I'd agree that a true Agile method project management tool (rather than a tool to help manage bespoke pieces of work) does need to be able to produce burn down/up charts and ideally some sprint functionality.

Having started trials with a few different products over the last few weeks to try to find one that supports both waterfall and agile, my assessment question "Does it support Agile" is the same answer for all of them, does Kanban but thats about it.

Rachel Kardos

We can fit our agile process into Wrike, but we need the reporting as well that compliments the methods. With many industries and organizations moving towards the agile methodology, it would benefit Wrike to accommodate the agile reporting needs. It would also benefit Wrike to make certain projects agile vs waterfall, building out an agile method in Wrike.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi everyone! Thanks for sharing your feedback here!

This post is close to receiving a status from the Product team, so please upvote if you haven't yet 🙂

/hc/en-us/community/posts/360014354593--Read-Me-Product-Feedback-forum-Guidelines-and-Statuses

I'd also like to mention Wrike Analyze here - it's a paid add-on with advanced analytics:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036508894-Wrike-Analyze

Michael Combest

Burn-down would be extremely helpful. As for running Agile in Wrike, it would be easy if sub-tasks status would cause those sub-tasks to appear in the column that is supposed to be indicating it's status. Right now, only parent tasks show on the board view, this makes sub-tasks unusable. Please get burn-down and burn-up charts to work in place of simple card traffic count - which isn't telling a very compelling story.

Alex Kondratyuk

Burn-down chart will help Scrum team to monitor Sprint progress and identify impediments toward completion. Completion percentange is good metric if you calculate earned value each day. While burn-down vizualizes progress on demand.

Upvoting request to have this feature delivered.

Permanently deleted user

Hey @Michael Combest and @Alex Kondratyuk, thank you for sharing this feedback! It's been passed on to the Product team.

Sittidach Ritkajorn

This would be very helpful for the development team. I voted. Could anyone be able to give me the estimaetd timeline for the roll out?

Nanci Brown

Any update on this topic? It's been in discussion for several years now that I can see, and it's an essential tool for any product that claims to be 'agile'...

Permanently deleted user

Hey everyone, thank you for all of your feedback here. As this suggestion has 60 upvotes, the Product team has shared this status update.

Burndown graphs for both projects and tasks are available in Wrike Analyze. You can learn more about this add-on and what it's capable of in this Help Centre article.

As for tracking the progress of a project based on the completion of it's tasks, this is possible with project progress. You can choose to analyze the progress of the project based either on how many tasks have been completed or on the duration of completed tasks. You can read more about this here.

As both of these suggestions are available in Wrike, the status of this post has been changed to Launched.

If you have any questions / feedback, be sure to let me know.

Louis-Félix Cauchon

Burndown charts is a basic/mandatory thing for SCRUM/Agile. It should not be part of a specialized product add-on with additional costs. Feel like you took the easy road. Asking people to pay more only to have burndown charts feel like a scam and I'm afraid you're gonna lose potential clients with this decision.

My 2 cents.

Marco Caciotti

Wrike is still very far to be a Scrum/Agile tool. Many users from different areas and businesses are adopting Scrum like frameworks; if the only action in the last two years is to ask for more money just to get a very trivial graph, you're simply going to fail to get/keep them. As a project manager, I'm really feeling to talk with the wrong counterpart, it's not only a matter of costs.

Elaine McDonagh

Thanks for your input here @Louis-Félix Cauchon and @Marco Caciotti.

Your feedback has been passed on to the team and we appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this.

If there's anything else we can help with here, please do let us know.

Wim Janin

Replying to Marco: Wrike *is* simply failing at it. There's genuinly no desire whatsoever to support more Agile in Wrike.

Customer now for over a year. Price level is reasonable, but still quite an amount for 25 users. The featureset is progressing very very very slowly. I'm basically still using the same application as a year ago, plus some long-overdue improvements.

Also still waiting on some crucial steps forward - but every month that passes by, my hope lowers, my frustration builds up and the desire to look for another tool increases. And the total and complete lack of Agile support is a big part of that frustration: no story points per sprint, no burn down chart, no sprint velocity, no resource availability per sprint, quite some inconvenience while working with boards (selecting a project for a sprint and it's tasks).

It has it's merits, but not for Agile projects. So dear Wrike Marketing team: please stop advertising Wrike to support Agile (like e.g. https://www.wrike.com/blog/what-is-burndown-chart/ ) . You simply create disappointed customers.

Marco Caciotti

@Wim Janin, fully agree with your post. I'm now a customer for more than two years, and the product is merely static. Very few "cosmetic" improvements, but the features and the limits of the system are always the same, and the strategy is to provide you other basic stuff as optional modules that would double or more the license fees, without fulfilling your needs.

Wrike is just a collaboration system; if you're looking for real project management, you have to look elsewhere, your frustration is just going to increase.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi @Wim Janin, @Marco Caciotti, thank you for your feedback! I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed!

Have you tried using Wrike Analyze?

Ashley Fischer

The burn down in analytics does not accomplish what the poster requested.

We do 2 week (14 day) sprints. We use Wrike Analyze to generate burndown charts for the meetings, but the chart doesn't show where we are compared to where we should be, so it's kind of pointless. This is a graph of a sprint that has 3 days left it in. The team is very far behind, but this graph doesn't really show how far behind the team really is.

We would like to show the projected burn down (based on task due dates) and the actual burn down (based on actual task completion). We would also like for the entire sprint length to be depicted (14 days), not just the days that have passed. The table I have added below shows how the sprint should be going, and I wish there was a way to overlay where we are currently on this chart as well.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for sharing these detail @Ashley Fischer! I'm passing your feedback to the team 🙌

Wim Janin

@Elizaveta Bogdanova I have to admire your positive attitude! If only you were the developer 😀

Basically this thread is similar to many threads:

we notice some fundamental flaws in Wrike,
you post an enthousiastic comment,
one, two, three years later we complain those flaws are still there,
go to bullet #2

but still, I smile (out of joy ànd desperation) reading your comments every time.

Ashley Fischer

@Elizaveta Bogdanova should I submit a new post for my suggestion? If this main thread says it's launched, are they really going to take a look at the other suggestions in the thread?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hey everyone! Apologies for the late reply here. I'm checking with the team to see if there are plans for the burndown graph improvements. I'll let you know if I have an update from the Product team.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi @Ashley Fischer, following up on your question - the team isn't currently planning improvements for the currently available graph, but we'll keep it on their radar and continue to pass on the feedback. At the same time, it might be helpful to create a new post and share the link here with everyone too, if you can.

Thanks a lot for your feedback here and apologies for not bringing any news yet.

Greg Hao

Tools like burndown charts help planners organize project timelines and efforts, but you’ll need a full-on project management solution to completely manage all your other moving parts. And, with Wrike, you can do all of that in one platform – from creating burndown charts to managing complex projects.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad that Wrike's own marketing blog (https://www.wrike.com/blog/what-is-burndown-chart) has an introduction on burndown and advertises it while the actual product cannot do this and the development team has no plans to implement this feature.