Tracking team performance in Jira with a Velocity + Cycle time charts combo

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Imagine you're the newly appointed Scrum Master for a software development team at a promising startup.

You've inherited a team that's struggling with its Agile processes, and stakeholders are growing increasingly frustrated with missed deadlines and unpredictable delivery.

As you dive into your role, you quickly realize the root of the problem: your team has no reliable way to measure their performance. And because they can’t measure it, they can’t do any effective planning either.

In your first few weeks, you identify several critical issues

1. Your team struggles to commit to a realistic amount of work each sprint. Sometimes they overcommit and burn out, other times they undercommit and seem unproductive.

2. Stakeholders are constantly asking, "When will this feature be done?" and your team can only respond with vague guesses.

3. You suspect there are bottlenecks in your workflow, but you have no data to pinpoint where tasks are getting stuck.

4. Without metrics, it's impossible to tell if your process changes are actually making a difference.

5. Team members and stakeholders alike are in the dark about the team's actual capacity and performance.

You know something needs to change, but you're not sure where to start.

Your first instinct is to look at what Jira already offers. After all, you're already using the platform, so it makes sense to start there.

You begin by exploring Jira native reporting tools for Agile teams

Jira Control Chart: This built-in feature shows cycle time and lead time for sprints, products, or versions. You're excited to see some data, but quickly realize its limitations:

• It only works for board-specific data, making it difficult to get a holistic view across multiple projects or teams.

• The customization options are limited, preventing you from diving deep into specific metrics you're interested in.

• It doesn't provide detailed breakdowns of time spent in different statuses.

Velocity Chart: This native Jira report gives you a basic idea of your team's velocity over time. However, you notice some drawbacks:

• It's based solely on story points, which can be subjective and inconsistent across teams.

• It’s limited by the number of sprints and teams you want to analyze.

• The chart is quite basic, lacking the detailed analytics and metrics needed to make data-driven decisions.

After a few weeks of trying to piece together meaningful insights from these native tools, you're feeling frustrated. You can see glimpses of useful information, but it's not enough to drive the kind of improvements you know your team is capable of.

You realize you need something more robust

Tools that can provide deeper insights, more customization options, and a more comprehensive view of your team's performance.

That's when you start looking beyond Jira's native capabilities and discover the world of Jira add-ons.

Then, you stumble upon the Agile Velocity Chart Gadget in the Atlassian Marketplace.

It catches your eye, as it helps you:

1. Gain insights on progress at every level: individual, team, or even across multiple teams.

2. With 10 advanced sprint metrics (including rollover, scope change, estimation change, and more), you can plan sprints more accurately. No more overcommitting or underutilizing your team's capacity.

3. You can now give stakeholders realistic timelines for feature delivery based on your velocity trends.

4. The benchmarking chart compares teams' performance and helps set realistic expectations.

Your team's performance starts to stabilize, and stakeholders are happier with the increased predictability.

But as you dig deeper into your processes, you realize that a piece—actually, several pieces — is still missing from the puzzle.

1. While your velocity is stable, similar-sized stories sometimes take wildly different amounts of time to complete. This makes it hard to estimate individual features or bug fixes accurately.

2. Despite maintaining a good velocity, some stories seem to get stuck in certain stages of your workflow. You suspect there are inefficiencies in your process, but you can't pinpoint exactly where.

3. When you implement process changes, you have no way to measure if they're actually making workflow faster.

4. The velocity metric is great for overall planning, but it doesn't help you understand the nuances of how different types of work (features, bugs, technical debt) flow through your system.

5. While you appreciate the improved release forecasts, more detailed questions emerge, like, "How long does it typically take to fix a critical bug?" or "Why did this feature take so much longer than a similar one last month?" Your velocity data alone can't answer these questions.

You realize that while velocity gives you the big picture of your team's output, you need something more to provide insights into the efficiency of your processes. You need a way to track and analyze how long work actually takes to flow through your system from start to finish.

So, you install Broken Build's Cycle Time Chart Gadget.

Cycle time histogram, trend, and time in status gadgets for Jira dashboard

Now, you have a complete suite of analytical tools that shed light on your Agile processes.

Here's what the Cycle Time Chart app provides:

1. Spotting bottlenecks: The Time in Status chart shows you exactly where work is getting stuck in your workflow.

2. Predictability at the story level: You can now give accurate estimates for individual stories based on historical cycle times for similar work.

3. Continuous improvement metrics: By tracking cycle time trends, you can see if your process improvements are actually making work flow faster.

4. Work item comparison: You can now see if certain types of stories consistently take longer, helping you refine your estimation process.

5. Drill down to the issue list: You can break down any specific segment to the deepest level of detail.

The perfect analytical suite for Agile teams

With both Velocity Chart and Cycle Time Chart in place, you've created a powerful analytical suite that seamlessly integrates into your Jira workflow.

Agile insights on your Jira dashboard

1. Both apps are designed as Jira dashboard gadgets. This means you can place them side by side on your Jira dashboard, creating a one-stop shop for all your key metrics. No need to switch between different tools or platforms – everything you need is right there in Jira.

2. Both gadgets pull data directly from your Jira instance, ensuring that you're always looking at the most up-to-date information. As soon as a story is moved or updated in Jira, your metrics reflect the change.

Unlimited sprints, unlimited teams or SAFe entities

1. Unlike some native Jira tools, both VEL and CTC allow you to analyze an unlimited number of sprints. This enables you to spot long-term trends and patterns that might not be visible when looking at just a few sprints.

2. Both gadgets can aggregate data from multiple teams or projects. This is particularly useful for program managers or executives who need to get a birds-eye view of performance across different parts of the organization.

3. You're not limited to predefined time boxes. Both gadgets allow you to set custom date ranges, giving you the flexibility to analyze performance over any period that makes sense for your team or organization.

Advanced filters and breakdowns

1. Both apps offer various ways to break down the data. You can analyze performance by issue type, priority, assignee, or any custom field you use in Jira. This allows you to dig deep into the factors affecting your team's performance.

2. Both gadgets come with powerful filtering capabilities. You can focus your analysis on specific types of work, particular team members, or any other criteria important to you. This helps you isolate problems and identify areas for improvement.

3. While the Agile Velocity Chart gives you average velocity, Cycle Time Chart complements this with percentile breakdowns of cycle times. This combination allows you to make more nuanced predictions and set realistic expectations for different types of work.

Happy end!

By leveraging apps by Broken Build, you've created a powerful, integrated analytics suite that provides deep insights without adding complexity to your workflow. The Velocity Chart Gadget focuses on output, while the Cycle Time Chart focuses on efficiency. Together, they provide a balanced view of productivity and process efficiency, so your Agile team can finally say 👌.