Time in Status Charts That Drive Action

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Jira already captures where work is. The harder question is how it behaves over time:
Which steps consume the most time? Is the process improving or quietly drifting? Where, exactly, do items “disappear” inside status groups?

That’s where Chart Reports in Time in Status becomes more than “pretty graphs.” Three visual elements consistently unlock the fastest insights—especially when stakeholders want clarity without reading a spreadsheet:

• Percentages on charts (instant proportional context)
• Trendlines (direction + early forecasting)
• Sunburst charts (hierarchy + hidden bottlenecks inside status groups)

Below is a practical, idea-heavy playbook for using these three to spot waste, prove improvements, and start better conversations across product, engineering, and support.

Why charts beat raw numbers for Time in Status conversations

Time metrics are emotional. A “7-day cycle time” might sound fine until it’s revealed that 5 days are spent in review, or that the number is rising every month. Charts help translate time into:

• Proportions (“How big is the problem?”)
• Movement (“Is it getting better?”)
• Structure (“Where inside the workflow is time piling up?”)

Percentages, trendlines, and sunburst charts map neatly to those three needs.

1) Percentages on charts: the fastest way to reveal “where time goes”

What percentages do (and why teams underestimate them)

Raw values answer: “How much time?”
Percentages answer: “How much of the total?”

That shift matters because most improvement decisions are comparative:

• “Is In Review taking 10 hours or 10 days?” is useful.
• “Is In Review taking 42% of the entire cycle?” changes priorities.

Showing percentages as labels on Pie, Bar, or Area charts makes patterns obvious even to people who don’t live in Jira dashboards.

High-value use cases for percentages

Workflow bottleneck fingerprint

• Use a chart grouped by statuses or status groups.
• Turn on percentage labels.
• Result: an immediate “fingerprint” of the process.

If Waiting for QA suddenly jumps from 12% to 27%, the workflow didn’t just slow down—its shape changed.
Those proportions suggest different problems—and different fixes.

Stakeholder-ready reporting
Executives rarely want 18 numbers. They want:

• “Most time is lost in handoffs”
• “Review consumes a third of the cycle”
• “Waiting dominates the flow”

Percentage labels deliver that narrative without extra explanation.

SLA / support responsiveness clarity
In service teams, “time to resolution” is often a blend of:

• active work time
• waiting on customer
• waiting on internal approvals

Percentages make it possible to say (without defensiveness): “Resolution is high because 48% of time is waiting on customer replies.”

2) Trendline: turning history into direction (and direction into action)

A trendline isn’t just decoration. It answers the question every team asks after seeing a chart:

“Okay… but is this improving?”

On column charts, trendlines add a linear model plus an equation and an R² value that indicates how well the line fits the data.

What trendlines do well

• Detect drift (slowly worsening cycle time that nobody feels sprint-to-sprint)
• Validate process changes (did the new policy actually help?)
• Support lightweight forecasting (what happens if nothing changes?)
• 

Interpreting the trendline without getting “too statistical”

The trendline equation is commonly shown like:

y = Ax + B | R² = C

• A (slope): how fast the metric changes per time unit
  
  
  • Positive slope → increasing time (risk)
  • Negative slope → decreasing time (improvement)
    
    
• R²: fit quality
  
  
  • closer to 1 → trend is consistent
  • low → data is noisy, outliers dominate, or change isn’t linear
    
    

Trendlines are most convincing when paired with a clear event marker:

• new review policy introduced
• WIP limits enabled
• staffing changes
• automation added
• release cadence changed

Even when the model is simple, it can still be decision-useful.

High-value use cases for trendlines

Proving that “process improvements” are real
After introducing review SLAs or automations, trendlines help answer:

• Did lead time actually drop, or did one easy sprint create an illusion?
• Is improvement sustained across multiple periods?
  
  

Forecasting future pain (before it becomes a fire)
If trendline slope is climbing, it’s an early warning:

• backlog aging will worsen
• delivery predictability will degrade
• customer wait will increase

Forecasting doesn’t need perfection—just a strong signal early enough to act.

Capacity planning with credibility
When a team asks for more people, the strongest argument is rarely feelings—it’s trajectory:

• “Average time in status is increasing by X each month”
• “R² suggests the pattern is stable”
• “If unchanged, next quarter will look like…”

That turns staffing into a data-backed conversation.

Identifying “hidden seasonality”
Monthly or sprint-based trendlines can reveal cycles:

• end-of-quarter slowdowns
• holiday-related delays
• release freeze effects

Once visible, teams stop treating repeat patterns as surprises.

Caution that keeps trendlines honest (and trusted)

• A trendline is linear. Real life often isn’t.
• If R² is low, it’s a sign to segment the data:
  
  
  • split by issue type
  • isolate a project
  • filter by a team
  • compare “before vs after” change

The best trendline story is often: “Overall trend is noisy—after filtering by label/team, the signal becomes clear.”

3) Sunburst chart: the clearest way to expose bottlenecks inside status groups

Sunburst charts are “out of the ordinary” for a reason: they’re built for hierarchical data.

In Jira workflows, hierarchy often exists implicitly:

• Status Categories → Statuses
• Status Groups → Detailed statuses
• Phases → steps inside phases

A sunburst chart makes that structure visible and comparable.

Why sunburst charts unlock insights other charts miss

A bar chart might show “In Progress” is large. Helpful—until the real problem is inside it:

• “In Progress → Code Review” dominates the phase
• “In Progress → Blocked” quietly takes a major share
• “In Progress → Waiting for QA” balloons after a process change
  
  

Sunburst charts answer: “Where exactly is the time hiding inside the big buckets?”

High-value sunburst use cases

Diagnosing “In Progress” that isn’t really progress
Many teams have a status group that functions like a black box. Sunburst reveals whether “In Progress” is mostly:

• actual development
• blocked time
• review time
• waiting time

That’s the difference between hiring, fixing policy, or clarifying definitions.

Comparing hierarchical workflows across squads
Two teams may share the same status groups but different sub-status behaviors. Sunburst charts can show that:

• Team A spends most “Review” time in peer review
• Team B spends most “Review” time in approval gates

Same label, different root cause.

Executive-level clarity without losing detail
Sunburst charts scale well for storytelling:

• Outer layers provide detail for practitioners
• Inner rings preserve high-level structure for leaders

It becomes possible to present one chart that works for both audiences.

Finding “policy bottlenecks”
Approval steps, external dependencies, or compliance checks often sit inside a phase and grow quietly. Sunburst makes them visually unavoidable—useful for initiating conversations about:

• automation
• parallelization
• early involvement
• clearer entry/exit criteria

Making these insights actionable in Time in Status Chart Reports

Charts become significantly more useful when they’re sliceable and consistent. In Chart Reports, the same configuration approach as Grid Reports helps create repeatable “diagnostic views,” such as:

• filter by Assignee, Project, Reporter, Sprint, Label, or saved filters
• control the report period (weeks, months, sprints, custom ranges)
• apply a calendar (24/7 vs working hours) to match how the team actually operates
• choose metric Duration and its Period for consistent comparisons
• export to PNG/JPEG/PDF/SVG for stakeholder-ready sharing
  
  

A practical pattern that tends to stick:

1. Start with percentages to find the “big rocks”
2. Add a trendline to see whether it’s improving or drifting
3. Use sunburst to pinpoint the exact sub-status that needs change

A simple framework for choosing the right chart element

Percentages when the question is:

• “Where does most time go?”
• “Which step dominates the cycle?”
• “How do teams compare structurally?”
  
  

Trendline when the question is:

• “Is this improving?”
• “Are we heading toward trouble?”
• “Did the change actually work?”

Sunburst when the question is:

• “Where inside the workflow phase is time hiding?”
• “Which sub-status is the real bottleneck?”
• “How do hierarchical steps compare?”

Better visuals don’t just explain work— they change it

Percentages, trendlines, and sunburst charts do something subtle but powerful: they move discussions away from opinions and toward observable behavior.

• Percentages create shared context.
• Trendlines add direction and urgency (or reassurance).
• Sunburst charts expose the “inside story” of status groups.

For teams already tracking Time in Status in Jira, Chart Reports can become the fastest route from “something feels slow” to “here’s exactly what to fix next”—and an easy way to communicate those findings in a format stakeholders actually absorb.

A gentle next step for anyone building more predictable delivery: explore these three visual tools inside Time in Status Chart Reports, save a few repeatable views (per team or project), and use them as a monthly health check. The workflow tends to become easier to improve once the data starts telling a clear story.