Aging Chart for Trello
Review your current work in progress. Assess the state of your process in the past. Monitor your work in progress health.
Review your current work in progress. Assess the state of your process in the past. Monitor your work in progress health.
The Aging Chart for Trello enables you to monitor your current tasks in progress. It uses the same visual format as your Trello board - each column represents a state in your workflow, and you can track how many days a task has already spent in progress.
The Aging Chart for Trello helps you spot where your process is slowing down while the task is still in progress. A big cluster of dots is a red flag that there is too much work in progress in your workflow.
On the Aging Chart, you can easily monitor the number of tasks in progress currently available in each list on your Trello board.
Make sure the number of work items doesn’t go beyond the WIP limit for each process state. Strictly stick to your WIP limits - this is essential to achieving faster delivery times and higher productivity.
Click on each dot to reveal more details about your work items in progress such as the type of the task and a direct link to the card in Trello. You can also see, at a glance, the times the task has spent in each list on your Trello board.
Tasks on the same list and with the same WIP age will be located together. In order to analyze them individually, click on the dot and expand the list to analyze them individually.
The Aging Chart for Trello allows you to change your basis date. That way, you can see what your process looked like on a certain date in the past and analyze how your tasks were aging back then.
We recommend using that feature as part of your retrospectives to evaluate what your workflow looked like in the past.
The percentile lines on your Aging Chart draw your past performance by showing the cycle times that were needed 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 delivering on time. If you’ve committed to the 85th percentile and your work item just moved to the orange zone crossing the 70th percentile, you shouldn’t cut from the scope or rush the implementation. That would only sacrifice the quality of your work. Instead, you can fulfill your commitment by expedite your work.
The colored health zones map out a timeline of how your tasks have advanced in the past in each of your process states. For example, the green zone displays the times that 50% of your tasks previously spent in each state.
Monitoring how your current work is moving through the zones gives you a pretty good chance of meeting your commitments. The higher the dots, the higher the likelihood of a delay. We would suggest taking a closer look at the tasks that move to the yellow zone, as these tasks have already spent more time in your process than half of the tasks completed so far.
The WIP widget displays the number of tasks in progress for the selected date, plus a line chart of how your WIP trends have changed over time. By hovering over the line, you can see the number of tasks in progress during each date of the selected period.
Maintaining a stable system depends on two main factors - your work in progress and your average age of work in progress. For these two metrics, the key is consistency – keeping your WIP and the average age of your WIP consistent is the key to achieving a stable system.
The ‘Average Age of WIP’ widget shows the average age of all your work items in progress on a specific date. It also displays how your WIP age trends have progressed over time. A linear trend line means that the average age of your WIP stays roughly equal on a daily basis. This denotes that you’re maintaining a stable system.
The average age of WIP and cycle time are essentially the same metric. The difference is that cycle time is measured against completed tasks, whereas the age of a task concerns tasks that are still in progress.