Cycle Time is the length of time it takes for a piece of work to travel through your workflow (or a portion of your workflow based on your configurations).
The Cycle Time histogram is a bar chart that shows the distribution of your various cycle times. In other words, it shows you how often you achieve a certain cycle time.
How to read the chart
The horizontal axis represents a Cycle Time. In this case, the number of days it took to complete items.
The vertical axis represents a Frequency. In this case, the frequency means the number of items that had that particular cycle time for the data shown.
In the chart to the above, you can see that more of our items have a cycle time of 57 2 days than any other option. But there were 7 items that had a cycle time of 29 days, 11 items that had a cycle time of 34 days, etc.
Hover over any bar to see the frequency of a given throughput.
Key Chart Controls
Percentiles
When you choose this option, the chart looks at all of the work items represented by and draws percentile lines at certain locations.
These lines can be interpreted as "XX% of items finished in X days or less"
For example, in the screenshot, you can say that 85% of our items were finished in 14 16 days or less. Or, you could say that 95% of our items were finished in 25 23 days or less.
Item Filter
You can filter down the items represented on this chart by choosing one or more available filters.
If you want to clear your filters so that all items are represented again, you click the Reset button.
Additional Chart Controls
Blocked Items
By default, the option "Include Time Blocked" is selected. If you deselect this option, you will see the chart change to show what the cycle times would have been if the items had not been blocked. Essentially it subtracts blocked time from the overall cycle time of each item and then plots them on the chart.
Cursor
When you choose Cycle Time or Frequency, the value on the relevant axis will be highlighted based on your cursor placement.
Overlay
Choose whether or not you would like to add a cumulative percentile line. With this line, you can see when a certain percentage of your finished items are accounted for at any given point on the horizontal axis.
Layout: Show Date Control
Use this to zoom into any specific subset of your data. You can narrow down the data horizontally (smaller time scale) and/or vertically (to narrow the range of throughput).
Workflow Stages
If you want to track the throughput of a smaller portion of your workflow, deselect the workflow stages you'd like to exclude.
When you remove workflow stages from the end of the list, it changes what it means to be done and therefore affects how many items are considered as throughput. So now, items entering Testing are considered finished.
If you have any questions, please submit them to our help desk.
Related Articles
Charts related to Cycle Time
Aging Work in Progress (via Done Percentiles)