Aging Chart
Track your current work in progress. Review the state of your process in the past. Evaluate your WIP and the average age of WIP consistency.
Track your current work in progress. Review the state of your process in the past. Evaluate your WIP and the average age of WIP consistency.
The Aging Chart enables you to track your current tasks in progress. It uses the same visual format as your Kanban board, with each column representing a state in your workflow. The Aging Chart shows how many days a task has already spent in progress.
The Aging Chart helps you identify where your process is slowing down while the task is still in progress. A big cluster of dots indicates that there is too much work in progress in a certain state.
On the Aging Chart, you will be able to see the number of tasks in progress currently available in each list on your Kanban board.
Make sure the number of work items doesn’t exceed the WIP limit for each process state. Sticking to your WIP limits is an essential part of achieving faster delivery times and higher productivity.
By clicking on each dot, you will be able to see more details of your work items in progress, including the type of the task and a direct link to your management platform. You can also perform an analysis of the times the task has spent in each process state.
Tasks on the same list and with the same WIP age will be clustered together. Click on the dot to expand the list and analyze them individually.
The Aging Chart allows you to change your basis date to see what your process looked like on a certain date in the past. Go back to any past date and see how your work items were aging back then.
We recommend using that feature during your retrospectives to see what your workflow looked like in the past.
The percentile lines on your Aging Chart represent your past performance and show the cycle times needed to complete your previous work.
As long as your tasks don’t cross the percentiles you use to define your service level agreements, you’ll be delivering on time. If you’ve committed to the 85th percentile for example and your work item just moved to the orange zone crossing the 70th percentile, don’t cut from the scope or don’t rush the implementation to be able to deliver it on time. That will sacrifice the quality of your work. Instead, in order to make sure you keep your commitment, expedite your work.
The colored health zones draw the timeline of how your tasks have advanced in the past in each of your process states. For example, the green zone shows the times that 50% of your previous tasks have spent in each state.
By observing how your current work is moving through the zones, you have a pretty good chance of meeting your commitments. The higher the dots, the larger the chance of delay. We recommend taking a closer look at the tasks that move to the yellow zone. These tasks have already spent more time in your process than half of the tasks completed so far.
The WIP widget displays the number of tasks in progress for the selected date, as well as how your WIP trends have changed over time. By hovering over the line chart, you’ll be able to observe the number of tasks in progress for each date of the selected period.
Maintaining a stable system depends on two main factors - your work in progress and your average age of work in progress. For these two metrics, the key is consistency – stable systems are determined by keeping both your WIP and the average age of your WIP consistent. And the more stable your delivery workflow, the more predictable it becomes.
The ‘Average Age of WIP’ widget shows the average age of all your work items in progress for the selected date. It also displays how your WIP age trends have built over time. If the average age of your WIP stays roughly equal on a daily basis, then its trend line will be linear; neither increasing nor decreasing over time. This means that you’re maintaining a stable system.
The average age of WIP and cycle time are essentially the same metric, only while cycle time is measured against completed tasks, the age of a task is a measure concerning tasks that are still in progress.