Find Workflow Delays with Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira

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In Agile project management, finding workflow delays is crucial for maintaining sprint efficiency. When issues remain in a status longer than expected, they create bottlenecks that delay development, impact release schedules, and disrupt sprint progress. To discover the root cause and take corrective actions, first, you need to discover where the delays are.

By leveraging the reporting capabilities of Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira, teams can gain visibility into where delays occur, analyze trends over time, and take proactive steps to optimize their workflow.

Finding Workflow Delays: Where to Start?

The causes of process inefficiencies are limitless, ranging from organizational challenges to resource constraints, communication errors, external dependencies, etc. However, they almost always manifest themselves as workflow delays. 

To get insight, you need to analyze issue histories.

Jira keeps each issue’s history in its changelog. Using the history tab under each issue, you can see all kinds of changes the issue went through, including all the status changes. 

The raw data is already here. However, Jira doesn’t give this as a ready-to-use report. With just vanilla Jira, finding workflow delays is almost impossible.

Enter Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira …

Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira helps teams pinpoint where issues lose time and analyze bottlenecks.

Timepiece offers several report types that can support teams in various stages of the analysis:

Status Duration Report

The first step in finding workflow delays is analyzing status times with a Status Duration Report. This report provides detailed insights into how long each issue spends in each status. To advance the analysis, users can configure consolidated columns (such as cycle time) and add issue estimation fields (such as Story Points) to the report as references.

Here you can see a Status Duration Report displaying the Story Size alongside the Cycle Time for each issue. This is a good viewpoint to start the analysis.

(Comparing issues with different sizes doesn't make sense but we'll get to it at the end. For the moment, let's ignore that)

Refining the Analysis with Filtering and Sorting

Of course, it would be hard to browse through all, if you have a lot of issues. At that point, you can refine your analysis using Filter and Sort features. You can Sort the report data according to column values to bring the longest times to the top or Filter the report data to focus on issues that spent time over a given threshold.

Here you can see issues sorted according to the Cycle Time column that brings the ones with the longest Cycle Times to the top. 

Similarly, here you can see a report that is filtered to display issues only that have Cycle Times longer than 12 days.

Analyzing Averages Over Time

Seeing individual issues is great. But what about the long-term picture? Is my team getting faster or slower?

This is where the Average report comes in. You can turn your report into an average report, grouped by time periods, to see if your average times are getting longer or shorter. For example, you can group your report by years, months, weeks, or days to see the trend over these periods.

Alternatively, you can group your issues by sprints to see the trend over sprints.

Considering Issues of Different Sizes

Of course, comparing issues of different sizes does not make sense. You might be breaking down all your work into similar size stories but you don't have to. What happens in that case?

You might be using T-shirt sizing (S-M-L-XL), the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...), or something else. In all cases, that data is probably available as a field on the issue. There are two ways to move forward with your analysis.

First, you can create separate reports that analyze each size group. For example, get a report for S issues, another for M issues, and another for L issues. For that, you change the report JQL to include only issues of the selected size

Alternatively, you can get a single report for all sizes.

Conclusion

Managing agile processes requires clear visibility into where issues lose time and actionable insights to eliminate bottlenecks. With Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira, teams can track status durations and time metrics for each sprint, identify recurring delays, and refine workflows for smoother sprint execution. 

By leveraging features like Status Duration Reports with Consolidated Columns, Average reports, Filtering, and Sorting capabilities, teams can pinpoint delays and proactively optimize their processes.

Visit our Atlassian Marketplace page or schedule a demo to explore how Timepiece-Time in Status for Jira can improve your team's current or past sprint performance. We're happy to answer any questions and guide you through the best practices for using Timepiece effectively.

Learn more about Timepiece on the marketplace page. Do you have more questions? 

With Timepiece, you're not just tracking time, you're taking control of it!

[SilkeS]

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