Aging Chart for Asana
Evaluate your current work in progress. Adhere to your WIP limits. Analyze the state of your process in the past.
Evaluate your current work in progress. Adhere to your WIP limits. Analyze the state of your process in the past.
With the Aging Chart for Asana, you can track your current tasks in progress. It uses the same visual format as your board in Asana, with each column representing a state in your workflow. The Aging Chart displays how many days a task has already spent in progress.
The Aging Chart for Asana helps you identify the slowest states of your process. A big cluster of dots indicates that there is too much work in progress in a particular state.
On the Aging Chart for Asana, you will be able to see the number of tasks in progress currently in each column on your board in Asana.
Make sure the number of work items doesn’t go beyond the WIP limit that you have put in place for each process state. To achieve faster delivery times and increase productivity, adhering to your WIP limits is paramount.
By clicking on each dot, you will be able to see more details of each work item in progress. You can also perform an analysis of the times the task has spent in each column on your Asana board.
Tasks on the same column and with the same WIP age will be plotted together. Click on the dot to expand the list and analyze them on a case-by-case basis.
The Aging Chart for Asana allows you to change your basis date. This will enable you to see what your process looked like on a certain past date and analyze how your work items were aging back then.
During your retrospectives, we recommend assessing what your workflow looked like in the past and identify opportunities for improvement.
The percentile lines on your Aging Chart represent your past performance and provide a concise overview of the cycle times required 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 finishing on time. If you’ve committed to the 85th percentile for example and you see your work item move 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 unnecessarily. Instead, you will be able to keep your commitment by expedite your work.
With the colored health zones, you observe the timeline of how your tasks have advanced in the past across all of your process states. For example, the green zone represents the times that half of your previous tasks have spent in each state.
By observing how your current work is moving through the zones and take actions accordingly, there is a high level of certainty that you will meet your commitments. The higher the dots, the larger the chance of a delay. So, the tasks that move to the yellow zone make good candidates for further inspection, because these tasks already have spent more time in your process than half of the tasks completed so far.
With the WIP widget, you can monitor the number of tasks in progress and compare how your WIP trends have changed with time. By hovering over the line chart, you can easily track the number of tasks in progress for each date of the selected period.
The key to maintaining a stable system lies with two main factors - your work in progress and your average age of work in progress. For these two metrics, consistency is vital – stable systems are established by keeping both your WIP and the average age of your WIP consistent. What’s more, the more stable your delivery workflow, the more predictable it is.
The ‘Average Age of WIP’ widget shows the average age of all your work items in progress on a certain date. It also displays how your WIP age trends have evolved over time. If the average age of your WIP stays roughly consistent on a daily basis, this will be presented by a flat trendline that’s neither increasing nor decreasing over time. It means that you’re maintaining a stable system.
The average age of WIP and cycle time are, in essence, the same metric. The difference is that, while cycle time is measured against completed tasks, the age of a task measures tasks that are still in progress.