Burn down graphs by hours?

We are using a sprint cycle for engineering and we organize a sprint as an asana project. We distribute tasks by estimated number of hours remaining to complete it. I like asana’s burn down graph for a project because it shows the progress on completed tasks by a deadline for a project, but it shows the number of tasks remaining and there seems to be no way of using a custom field to show the burn down of the number of hours instead. A task may be 30 minutes or 16 hours so it’s a big difference.

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@zacwitte Great suggestion- I’ll definitely pass that along to the team. Would you mind expanding on when your team would use this? Is this context use in planning, reporting, executive briefs, or elsewhere? Let me know so I can describe the impact this would have for your team when passing this along. Thanks!

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It would have an impact both at the beginning of a sprint (when you are planning what work should be completed in a 2-3 week sprint period) and at the end of a sprint (when you are reporting to what got accomplished and what the “burn down” was during the sprint). My understanding is that Asana uses sprints internally to drive development efforts forward. Basically the burndown chart is an invaluable tool during all phases of a project to see how you are performing vs the total hours paid for or budgeted. However, as @zacwitte indicated, it MUST show HOURS, not NUMBER of tasks. That is a really a useless metric because the tasks differ substantially in the effort / time required to complete them. If we had this capability in Asana, it would change everything, we could essentially use Asana for all aspects of our Agile / SCRUM methodology.

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This could work perfectly with number custom fields. The dashboards could have functionality to choose what we would like to see by choosing custom fields. Ayayayya this would be so great! We really miss burn down charts.

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Love your enthusiasm, @Adam_Sabla!

@MattO creating a burndown chart was discussed in another thread. While Asana doesn’t provide a visual report for custom fields, it would be straightforward to build one to your specifications using the API (as it supports custom fields).

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