A book about forecasting, not guessing
Burnup charts feel certain.
They rarely are.
Burnup charts are familiar, easy to build, and trusted by almost every agile team. They're also quietly misleading: a straight line into the future assumes stable scope and a consistent delivery rate, assumptions that rarely survive real product work. But "just do Monte Carlo" isn't the fix either. Once Feature WIP and cross-team dependencies enter the picture, simple probabilistic models start to break too. Beyond Burnups builds forecasting back up properly, feature by feature, team by team, until you're treating delivery the way an underwriter treats risk: with ranges, evidence, and an honest number instead of a hopeful one.
What's inside
A straight line was never going to work on a system this messy
Most teams answer "when will it be done?" with a Burnup chart: completed work climbing toward a scope line until it crosses a projected date. It looks like a forecast. It's really an average dressed up as a certainty.
Beyond Burnups explains why that approach breaks down, then rebuilds forecasting from the ground up using Monte Carlo simulation: starting with a single team and a single backlog, extending to Feature-level forecasting when several pieces of work compete for the same throughput, and scaling up to Multi-Team Monte Carlo for initiatives that span teams and dependencies. Later chapters cover where AI genuinely helps, how to forecast value rather than just dates, and how to bring sceptical stakeholders along with you.
It's written to be read in an evening and put to work the next day, with free, open-source tools referenced throughout so you can apply it to your own data immediately.
Praise for Beyond Burnups
What early readers are saying
"A quick, sharp, and essential read for anyone responsible for shipping software."
Steve Pereira, author of Flow Engineering
"You'll never look at a burnup chart the same way again."
Benjamin Richards, Systems Coach at KFC
"A rigorous, data-driven wake-up call for anyone tired of false precision."
Helen Beal, Founder at Flowtopia
About the author
Nicolas Brown
Nicolas is Principal Flow Consultant at Thrivve Partners, a boutique consultancy helping organisations build digital products more effectively. His path there ran through eCommerce delivery at Royal Mail Group, agile coaching at PwC across the UK, Middle East, US and Brazil, and leading agility for a 100-team technology organisation at ASOS.
Along the way he built and open-sourced a set of flow-metrics tools for Jira and Azure DevOps, including FlowVz, aimed at replacing guesswork with data teams can actually see. Beyond Burnups is his second book, going deeper into the forecasting techniques he only touched on in his first, Real World Agility.