Estimating project timelines with high accuracy can be challenging, especially when relying on traditional task-based estimation methods. Favro’s control charts and throughput metrics offer a data-driven approach that can lead to more reliable project estimates.
As mentioned in this article, working with team boards lets you easily overview ongoing work, see team capacity, and identify bottlenecks. Once your team is set up to work in a way that allows everyone to overview ongoing work, the next step is to start getting work done done. The way to get a lot of things done is to focus on the flow of work and finishing what’s already started rather than taking on new work.
Keep work flowing with cycle times
When working flow based, one of the key metrics to keep an eye is Time in column for cards as they travel through the columns of your board. This shows how long cards have been in their current stage. You can toggle this on by clicking on the eye icon.
If this number is high (compared to the norm and your estimated effort) it means that for some reason cards are stuck in a column longer than expected. These should be investigated to see if there is anything in the process that needs to be improved to reduce the time in column and keep work flowing. You might need to add one more column, break down tasks even further, enforce card limits or analyze if you have enough capacity in your team to perform certain work.
When a card is moved to the next column, the number is set to zero. It’s possible that a card has been in progress for a long time, even if the time in the column does not show that. Therefore, it might be a good idea to also show Time on board on cards. This will allow you to track the total time a card has been in progress. If the card returns to its previous status, the time in that column is not lost, and time is still counting.
Make sure your process is in control with throughput metrics
Actively working with these metrics also comes with the benefit of being able to view the data in a retrospective. The Control chart allows you to see how your process and efficiency has changed over time and the team’s overall output. You can use it to analyze your team’s performance, measure how a process change has impacted your team’s productivity or to identify and solve bottlenecks as they occur.
You'll find the control chart by opening the View switcher and then click Dashboards view, select Add widget and choose Control chart.
Setting the Control Chart
When the chart is created, some options can be changed to reflect specific data. You can use Filters to specify the exact cards you want to see in the chart. Select a Board from which you want to gather the data. Apply a Date range for the period you want to see the results. Choose which Status columns you wish to include to show how long the card stayed in them. This allows you to focus on specific workflow segments, enabling more granular insights and lets you analyze specific parts of your workflow separately.
If you want to see only the cards that have gone through all the statuses to the last one, you can select the Automatic option in Status columns menu. This will not show cards if they skipped at least one status through the workflow.
Control Chart elements
At the top there is a table with 5 main metrics of the chart:
Average (Average amount of time for the cards to go through the selected statuses)
Min (Minimum amount of time it took the cards to go through the selected statuses)
Max (Maximum amount of time it took the cards to go through the selected statuses)
Median (Median amount if time it took the cards too go through the selected statuses)
Cards (The total amount of cards that moved through the selected statuses)
The chart shows the time on board as Elapsed days on the vertical axis and the Dates on the horizontal axis.
The orange line tells you the Rolling Average: average completion time over time, helping identify trends.
The orange flat line also shows Standard deviation: indicates the variance in task completion times, highlighting consistency or areas with delays for the completed cards that travel through the length of the board (i.e. time on board).
Every completed card is a Bubble: individual cards that show how long each of them have spent in a stage.
The image above shows that the average time for completing a card was going up and down. When investigating the reasons for this you can hover the outliers to see exactly at what stage the process was slowing down. You can also review the upper table metrics to identify the more accurate estimates and average/median time it took to complete the cards. Once you have analyzed the causes you can act upon this information and improve the future planning.
Frequently keeping an eye on these metrics will help you identify bottlenecks and solve them to keep work flowing. The control chart allows you to view the team’s performance in a retrospective and dig into the causes of bottlenecks to help you continuously improve your process and provide more accurate estimations based on real, historical data rather than projections, resulting in timelines that more closely reflect actual completion times.
Want to learn more?
Knowing about tracking bottlenecks and keeping work flowing, you might want to dig a little deeper into how to work with dependencies in Favro.