Getting the Flow Efficiency metric

[Dionei Piazza]

How can I get the flow efficiency on a Jira Kanban Board?

Flow efficiency = Active time (Touch time) / Total time.

Note: I dont want to use plugins. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Dionei Piazza 

Quick question: how will you know when an issue is in active time (touch time)?

If you can determine this by team working hours and the status of work items, you can build this yourself using the automation rules which are now included with JIRA Cloud.  Here is a overview, how-to:

• Learn about the automation rule capabilities
• Map out the team's workflow to determine active time, status values
• Add custom fields for the start and end date-times of your active time, status values
• Add custom fields for any reporting you want to do (e.g. flow efficiency)
• Add your reporting fields to the views.  (You may not want to display the start/end date-time fields, but you can always report on them with filters.)
• Add automation rules, triggered on status transitions, to set the date-time values
• Add an automation rule to compute your reporting values.  The key is deciding the correct trigger for this rule.  Rule execution order is non-deterministic, so if you need to enforce it, create your own trigger condition to monitor. (e.g. special comment, custom field, etc.)

To learn more about the automation rules, please see here: 

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/automate-your-jira-cloud-processes-and-workflows/

Best regards,

Bill

[Carl Weller]

The first thing you have to do is have workflows that support understanding what is touch time vs wait time (e.g. In Development vs Waiting for Test). The typical In Progress, Doing, Done is not going to be enough. This is effectively what Bill has described above. That's the easy bit.

The hard bits are:

• Ensuring the team actually keeps Jira up to date and items transition when they are supposed to
• Fixing the problems that you see

Arguably you can see enough info on existing reports (CFD and Control Chart) to diagnose major areas to look at if your workflows are granular enough. Making use of the Flagging function with comments and running blocker clustering sessions with the team can also be very useful.

Note: none of this is really useful if you don't have management support to change team behaviour and/or implement fixes.