3 Ways to Identify Bottlenecks in your Jira workflow process

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Have you already examined the outcomes of your team's 2022 activities? Almost every manager faces a critical question: Has the essential indicator growth been adequately controlled throughout the reporting period? It's crucial to determine how much money is spent to get these results.

Jira is a robust project management tool that can monitor issues and manage projects. In this article, we'll discuss how to detect wasteful delays for Jira teams. So it’s necessary to use one of the time in status Jira plugin. We will talk about it in this article, so don’t miss a chance to get lots helpful resources in single place. 

To continuously enhance the organization, it's necessary to identify everyday bottlenecks that hinder processes and investigate possibilities for development.

Monitoring time-consuming during different stages (Jira statuses) of task performance is one of the most effective ways to analyze scrum teams' working process delays. By comparing figures for different assignees, you can perform a critical analysis. Then you can figure out who is causing the delays. Consider various approaches to analyzing time in status data.

Monitor the time each assignee spent on active statuses. Let's start with direct work on tasks to explore the process components (issues in progress statuses). The most accessible approach to get these data totals for a specific period is to use averages. For example, statistics may reveal the following scenarios:

Most employees have the same average time, but some work a bit more. Then, it is worth investigating why that happens:

• by determining how this personnel operates,
• by ensuring they have appropriate knowledge (qualifications), 
• by providing adequate tools and access rights
• by verifying that they are not overburdened.
  

Suppose an employee's time is significantly reduced (less time to work, but he's more efficient). In that case, the management should discover the reasons and discuss the instruments used to complete jobs quickly with this employee. Probably, this employee:

• has greater expertise
• work with more effective tools
• has higher motivation

It is worth sharing this employee's working hints and tips with others: effective methods, best practices, and insights to open the possibility for a more intensive workload and promotion.

Analyze unproductive delays in workflow

In your team, these statuses function as a complicated workflow process, including different support levels (L1, L2), several developers, QA engineers, and PMs, for example.

When working on projects that haven't been completed, tasks with inactive statuses become increasingly prevalent; these tasks include such Jira statuses as on hold, waiting for developer or support, etc. Managers are interested in finding why and in what statuses unnecessary delays occur in this scenario.

We all know that if the Jira time spent waiting is reduced, jobs are completed considerably more quickly. Inactive statuses that cause delays should be investigated.

If you see inactive statuses causing unproductive delays, you can assume the following:

• Unassigned task priorities – employees have no idea which task is essential; thus, they complete them in order of importance. It might result in the VIP customer's assignment being "pushed to the side," delayed, or even lost. Our attention and efficiency improve when we work on priorities.
•  Our attention and efficiency improve when we work on priorities.
• Due to a lack of communication across departments, colleagues from one department should wait too long for the related tasks from another.
• Employees are not concentrated or motivated enough, so their tasks stay inactive for too long.

Identifying and fixing delays will improve task performance and team efficiency. Workflow bottlenecks might vary for different reasons. The ways to resolve emergent difficulties can be completely unexpected, but you can predict them using tools for monitoring.

Which Jira time in status plugin can provide this kind of information?

You may use a variety of methods to access the time in status data for Jira issues:

• Days in Column is a built-in Jira feature (available only for the classic boards). You may find instructions for enabling this functionality here. However, if you need to recall time measurements over time by status (for example, how long was I in status X>), you'll have to look at other choices.
• To calculate the time in status, use custom fields and automation rules.
• Try one of the Atlassian Marketplace add-ons. 

Last but not least is Time in Status for Jira Cloud add-on. It allows you to obtain time-consuming data automatically and evaluate it quickly. Furthermore, this Jira add-on allows you to monitor archived data which you had before downloading the add-on. Time in Status for Jira Cloud suggests the following analysis of data concerning team member work delays throughout the reporting period:

• It generates the Jira time in status report to identify how long issues have stayed in each status;

• The Average time report for each assignee;
  

• Pivot table function (built-in) — converts the Jira time in status data for each assignee to averages or percentages values. This report provides the ability to compare the Jira status time data of the whole team.
  

Every report generated by this add-on provides the data that may be used to examine absolute values over time in status, date dynamics, or assignee. The add-on allows getting data in both the graph and issue list view. You may get an overall view from several perspectives with this information.

As a result, a time in status analysis for your team might help to identify bottlenecks. It enables you to recognize and respond quickly to positive and negative productivity results. It allows you to take the correct actions and make better decisions: if the results are unfavourable, remove the impediments; if the results are positive, identify and scale up productive adjustments. This is always a great ability - to improve efficiency using some add-ons which simplify the Jira workflow process. You can find Time in Status for Jira Cloud on the Atlassian Marketplace and ensure how useful it can be. 

How do you identify bottlenecks in your working process? What are your secrets to improve the teamwork? Please, share your helpful tips with us. So it will be interesting to learn something new from each other.