Aging Work in Progress

Unlike most charts, this one tells you information about work currently in progress. If you look at this chart frequently, perhaps at your daily scrums or standups, you can manage your work so that it never gets older than it should.

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Every dot on this page becomes a dot on your cycle time scatterplot when it finishes. If you have a service level agreement (SLA) or service level expectation (SLE), you can utilize this chart to help you better adhere to them. Even if you don't have SLAs or SLEs, this chart can help you spot work that is getting older than it should.

Using this chart regularly to help manage your work results in better cycle times!

How to read the chart

The horizontal axis represents the workflow you've configured for this data set. The vertical axis represents the age of work in progress, from when it entered the first column until now. 

Each dot represents a work item currently in progress. The placement of the dot tells you two things:

1. What workflow state the item is currently in.

2. The cumulative age of the work item (NOT the time it has spent in the individual workflow state).

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If a dot has a number on it, it means there are <number> items with that age in that particular workflow state. In the example to the right, it shows a dot telling us there are 4 items in Dev Active with an age of 12 days.

Information for individual dots

When you hover over a dot, a tooltip pops up that contains the following common information about the items represented by the dot:

1. start date

2. current age

If you click on the dot (instead of hover) that window will persist and you will be able to select an individual work item and get additional detail.

Information for individual work items

Once you hover or click on a specific work item, you see the following information show up on the chart:

1. Blue bars showing the length of time the item spent in each workflow state so far. There are labels above each bar (or above the horizontal axis if no time was spent in that state) that tell you the number of days.

2. A larger tooltip box with Work item details, including a repeat of the stage times in a tabular format. This table also includes total blocked time.

Dot Colors

The dots on the chart can be colored based on any available item filter. The options to choose from should be identical to the options available in your item filter. The list is compromised of the columns following the workflow stages in your Source Data.

You can select a filter type to use for dot colors, select which options you want to show colors for from that filter, and you can even adjust the colors you use for each chosen option.

• Select Attribute: Select which attribute you wish to assign colors to.

• Auto-Assign All: Simplify adding colors to your attributes by auto-assigning them.

• Reset All: Reset all of the dot colors assigned to your attributes.

• Individual Attribute Colors: Pick a color for the dot of each individual attribute.

• Individual Attribute Assign: Assign the color of the dot of each individual attribute.

• Individual Attribute Reset: Reset the dot color of individual attributes.

• Default Dot Color: Choose the default color of the dots.

• Default Color Palette: Choose a color palette that will be the default for your dots.

Done percentiles (horizontal lines)

When you choose this option, the chart looks at your historical data (shown on your cycle time scatterplot) and draws percentile lines at certain dates. These lines can be interpreted as "XX% of the time, our work items finish in X days or less." So, if there is an 85% line at 20 days then you can interpret that line as meaning "85% of the time our work finishes in 20 days or less."

Pace percentiles (colored bands)

These colored bands help make it easier to see when an item is in danger of breaching expectations based on where they are in the workflow.

You can choose which percentile lines you'd like to base the pace percentiles off of and you can choose which color scheme you want to use. The default is the traffic signal set (green-yellow-red) but that is not a great option for color-blind populations so there are other options available to choose from in the dropdown on the right nav.

How the color bands are calculated

The color bands are created by applying the done percentile lines to the individual column.  Let's look at the Dev Active column in the example to the right from the bottom up:

• 50% of the items moved out of this column at 5 days old or less (dark green)

• 70% of items moved out at 8 days old or less (light green)

• 85% of items moved out at 13 days old or less (yellow)

• 95% of items moved out at 18 days old or less (orange)

• all older items (red)

Stalled Alert

You can decide to have the dots on the chart highlighted if they have been in a column for more than a set amount of days by checking the "Highlight Stalled Items" configuration option and changing the number to what is appropriate for your needs.

Date Range

Aging Replay

If you want to see what the chart looked like on a previous day you can use the Aging Replay option. To use it, slide the slider to the day you want to see. If you want to see the movement over time, slide the slider slowly and watch the chart change. If the numbers on the vertical axis increase as you move to earlier dates, it means the work is not aging as much as it used to. Alternatively, if it decreases then your work is aging more than it used to.

Cursor

You can choose to have a percentile line show up wherever you move your cursor by checking the "Cycle Time / Percentile" configuration option.

Done Items Selection

The percentile lines are calculated using your past data. This configuration option shows you the past data used and allows you to select a smaller data set. Use your mouse to select a section of the dots on the chart that appears. As you change the selection, you will see the percentile lines move.

Item Filter

You can filter down the dots shown on this chart by choosing one or more available filters. 

If you want to clear your filters so that all dots show up again, you click the Reset button.

Workflow Stages

Only checked workflow stages will appear as columns in the chart. For the below, the first column would be Analysis Done and the age of each dot will be cumulative from the first checked stage in the workflow. 

The last checked Workflow Stage will be considered the stage in which items are considered completed. If you were to uncheck Done, Testing would be the stage in which items are considered completed and no longer appear on this chart as it shows Work In Progress.

If you were to uncheck an intermediate Workflow Stages, say Dev Active in the image below, the items in Dev Active workflow stage will be shown in the Analysis Done column in the chart and the time spent in Dev Active would be added to the time spent in Analysis Done as well.