The purpose of this chart
Throughput is the rate at which work is finished in a given time period (items per day, week, etc.).
The throughput histogram is a bar chart that shows the distribution of your daily throughput. In other words, it shows you how often you achieve a certain daily throughput.
How to read the chart
The horizontal axis represents a daily Throughput. In this case, the number of items you completed in a day.
The vertical axis represents a Frequency. In this case, the frequency means the number of days you achieved a certain daily throughput.
In the chart to the right it clearly shows that, in most days, we deliver ZERO items.
But there were 75 days that we delivered one finished item, 40 days that we delivered two, 25 days that we delivered three and so on. As the throughput is less frequent, our expectation of it happening again should also reduce. These outcomes are less likely than the ones that happen often.
Hover over any bar to see the frequency of a given throughput.
Key Chart Controls
Click on any image to make it bigger!
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 the time, our we finish X days or less per day"
In the image to the right, you can say that 70% of the time we finish 1 item or less per day, for example. Or, you could say that 95% of the time we finish 3 items or less per day.
Pro Tip
The higher you go up in percentage, the more outliers that it includes. You are, with this data, less likely to finish 3 items per day than 1. Remember, it is a 95% chance that you'll 3 items OR LESS per day, not 3 items or more.
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
Cursor
When you choose Throughput 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 how what 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 In Review are considered finished.
