When does cycle time clock start in Actionable Agile?

[Esther Strom]

I'm the site admin for a company that's decided to use the Actionable Agile plugin. The decision was made by one of our senior directors who's used the product before and is familiar with it, but there was no training provided to me or any of our users, and some of their questions aren't answered by the documentation.

For context, we are in the middle of moving to Scrumban as an interim step between full-on Scrum and plain Kanban. This means our boards are still sprint boards and teams work in sprints, but they do not use story points anymore.

Many of the teams use a status called Ready to indicate that grooming is complete since they can no longer tell based on seeing story points in the backlog.

The question I've received is: does changing the story status from Backlog to Ready start the clock for cycle time if Todo is excluded from the Actionable Agile data set config? They’re wondering if changing the Backlog status to Ready post grooming is hurting cycle time.  

[Margaux]

Hi @Esther Strom ! 
ActionableAgile calculates cycle time as follows: end date + start date +1. Start and finish can mean different parts of your workflow depending on the teams, so to indicate what start and finish mean, all you have to do is select the workflow stages you are interested in in the controls: the first checked stage represents the start (cycle time would start counting when an issue enters this stage) and the last checked workflow stage represents the end (the cycle time clock stops when an issue enters this stage). The +1 makes sure that we take the start and finish points into account as if you start and finish an item on the same date the cycle would be 0.

In your context, If your workflow is as follow: Backlog > Ready > To do and you wish for the cycle time clock to start when your issues enter Ready, then all you have to do is check Ready as your first workflow stage and keep Backlog unchecked. 

An important step when loading your data is to make sure in step 2 (mapping stage) that all you workflow stages and statuses are mapped correctly, you can absolutely have as many columns as you want for more granularity. Changes made to your workflow in ActionableAgile has no impact in Jira, it's all about visualising your data better. 

We offer free demo and training, feel free to reach out to our support team at support@55degrees.se our via our support portal https://support.55degrees.se/. Flow metrics can be tricky so we are here to help you! 

Have a nice day,
Margaux (Manager Customer Experience)