What is the Monthly Average Time in Column insight?

Companies use this insight to analyze their development stages and detect bottlenecks. The recommendation is to keep each stage short to maintain an agile delivery flow. Tracking the time Jira or Trello issues spent in a given status is critical for optimizing development processes and ensuring efficient workflow management.

This metric is calculated by looking at the time taken by each stage of development across the issue lifecycle, broken down per month.

The Time per Column is broken down into 3 stages:

• Pickup time is the total duration spent in the initial status (“To Do” or “Selected for Development” by default) before the development starts
• Coding time is the total duration spent in the development status (“In Progress” by default) 
• Testing time is the total duration spent in the test status ( "Staging", "UAT" or "QA" by default) 

Statuses names can be changed to match your specific Jira or Trello definitions.

Key Benefits of the Monthly Average Time in Column for Jira and Trello

• Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint stages in your workflow where delays frequently occur. This insight helps in addressing and mitigating bottlenecks, improving overall process efficiency.
• Improve Estimations: Enables better estimation of task durations, leading to more accurate project timelines and resource allocation, enhancing your team's planning and forecasting capabilities.
• Measure Performance: Evaluating team performance and productivity. By setting benchmarks and analyzing trends over time, you can identify high-performing areas and those requiring improvement, ultimately boosting team efficiency and output.
• Ensure Transparency: Fosters transparency within the team and with stakeholders by providing a clear picture of progress and potential delays, facilitating better communication and collaboration
• Optimize Workflows: Refine and streamline workflows based on data-driven decisions to reassign tasks, adjust priorities, and implement process improvements, leading to more efficient operations.

How to Improve on this Metric?

Pickup Time is High

• Locate bottlenecks in engineers’ plannings
  • Use the Value Stream Management dashboard to understand your engineering habits and patterns and optimize your resources allocation, and added-value
  • Use the Sprint overview dashboard to assess your engineering team’s planning and activity.
• Avoid issue “hoarding”: Only add issues to the development tasks that you know your team can deliver.

Coding Time is High

• Reduce the size of issues/user stories to streamline the development tasks. 
• Locate bottlenecks in engineers’ plannings
  • Use the Value Stream Management dashboard to understand your engineering habits and patterns and optimize your resources allocation, and added-value
  • Use the Sprint overview dashboard to assess your engineering team’s planning and activity.
• Ensure the scope of tasks is clear as missing or vague specifications often lead to back-and-forths and longer development times.

Testing Time is High

• Reduce the size of issues to streamline the reviews. Bigger items are less likely to be picked up for testing and are more difficult to review.
• Give engineers some dedicated time to perform their review on a daily or weekly basis.
• Empower senior engineers to make junior reviewers grow into making relevant and rigorous reviews (which eventually leads to fewer reviews).