Fix Bottlenecks and Obstacles in your Way!

For those of you familiar with Kanban or Six Sigma, you’ll be delighted to learn we’re introducing Cycle Time and Cumulative Flow charts to your Axosoft Dashboard. If you’re not familiar, we’ll show you how these tools can help you identify bottlenecks and eliminate obstacles that are slowing your team down!

What is Cycle Time?

Do you need to get an idea of how long an item is in a given status or workflow step? Are you looking to group this information by team member? Do you need a metric for daily success? Well, here is where cycle time can help.

Below I have built a Cycle Time gadget that tells me how long on average an item sits in any given status.

I can see that Drew’s items stay in “open” on average for 25.2 hours before transitioning over to “in progress” or “closed” status. Now that we have this in mind, we can work to identify bottlenecks to reduce this time not just for Drew, but for the other team members as well.

When configuring your Cycle Time gadget, you can select whether you prefer to track status or workflow step cycle time, you can specify a project or release, apply a filter, and even set the start and end of the workday.

What is Cumulative Flow?

Cumulative flow is useful for identifying bottlenecks in your projects. It aggregates a count of how many items sit in a given status or workflow step at the end of each day. Below is a quick example:

Here we see this project currently has 5 items sitting in “in progress.” Ideally, we want this shaded section to remain as small as possible. If any of these portions were to widen over time, then that is a cue to our team to review ways to get that bottleneck under control.

Much like Cycle Time, you have the ability to customize your Flow gadget based on project folder, release, filters, and more.

We hope these two gadgets enlighten your processes, whether you use Axosoft for project management, customer support, or both.

For more details about other features introduced in v16.3, check out our version history.