Measure your flow efficiency. Find the tasks with the longest waiting times. Track how your flow efficiency trends build over time.
The Flow Efficiency Chart for Trello visualizes the flow efficiency of your completed tasks, with flow efficiency percentage on the horizontal axis and number of work items on the vertical axis.
Optimizing your flow efficiency starts with understanding your waiting time. To be able to measure your flow efficiency, you first need to design your Kanban board to support that concept. Divide the states in your workflow into working states where tasks are being worked on, and queue states, where tasks are held up waiting.
By clicking over the bars, you can see more task details including the flow efficiency of the tasks, a direct link to the cards on your Trello board, and the cycle time breakdown of the time your work has been in progress.
Once you’ve located the tasks with the longest queue times, those on the left side of your graph, consider the factors causing their delays. A higher flow efficiency translates to a faster and smoother delivery process.
The ‘Average Flow Efficiency’ widget on the top of the graph shows the average flow efficiency percentage of your workflow. In addition, it enables you to track how your trends have been developing over time. Ideally, the line should remain even or slightly increase.
Cutting down your inactive time will improve your overall cycle time. Start off by monitoring your wait time, as this is usually the easiest and cheapest area to investigate when it comes to process improvement.
The ‘Percent range’ control on your sidebar allows you to filter out specific percent ranges from your Flow Efficiency Chart for Trello.
The percent range filter can be adapted for those occasions where you don’t want to monitor any edge cases, such as tasks with 0% or 100% flow efficiency.