Observe your flow efficiency. Analyze the tasks with the longest waiting times. Track how your flow efficiency trends build over time.
The Flow Efficiency Chart for Azure DevOps maps out the flow efficiency of your completed work items for the selected time period. The work items’ flow efficiency percentage is displayed on the horizontal axis and the number of work items is on the vertical axis.
The first step to improving flow efficiency is visualizing your waiting time. To be able to measure your flow efficiency, you need to design your Azure board to support that concept. Make sure you divide the states in your workflow into working states where work items are actually in progress, and queue states, where work items are held up waiting.
By clicking over the bars, you can find out more about each work item, including the flow efficiency of the work items, a direct link to the cards on your Azure board, and the cycle time breakdown of your work items.
Once you’ve identified the work items with the longest queue times, those on the left side of your chart, think about the reasons behind their delays. The higher your flow efficiency is, the more efficient delivery process you maintain.
The ‘Average Flow Efficiency’ widget on the top of the graph measures the average flow efficiency percentage of your workflow, alongside how these trends have evolved over time. Ideally, the line should remain even or slightly increase.
Investigating your wait time is usually the easiest and cheapest area to evaluate first when it comes to process improvement.
The ‘Percent range’ control on your sidebar provides the flexibility to filter out certain percent ranges from your Flow Efficiency Chart for Azure DevOps.
The percent range filter caters for those instances where you don’t want to monitor edge cases, like work items with 0% or 100% flow efficiency.