Work item ageing charts are particularly useful for solving issues that are currently impacting your teams. Whilst other charts such as Lead Time Distributions and Scatterplots can be useful for coming up with countermeasures for issues that you experience in the past, Work Item Ageing charts are useful for the present issues.
Lets look at an example below:
To break it down:
- X-Axis – This is the date that the item was started
- Y-Axis – This is how old the ticket is (how many days since it was committed to)
Each dot represents a work item that is currently in progress.
For the purpose of this post, lets assume that our lead time expectation with customers is 90% within 50 days. We can see one work item approaching 80 days! This is something that should have been actioned earlier, but without a chart like this we may not see those things. This will likely need some customer alerts if that hasn’t already happened and some work to regain our customers trust. Although it falls within our 10%, it has far exceeded the expectation and needs rapid action.
The two items approaching 40 days also need action as our lead time is fast approaching. This case is not as dire as we are still within expectations, but as a leader you will need to offer support to remove blockers, plus you might also want to think about other ways to get this done. For example, you might need to increase their class of service to get the team swarming on these to make the date.
The item that’s at 25 days is not necessarily a problem yet, but may be a problem in the not too distant future. Keep an eye on this, but no need for anything drastic yet.
The Work Item Ageing chart is really useful for helping you see issues that are in your system right now. You may need to create policies to ensure that your lead time and other customer expectations are being met. It can also be useful for ensuring that you have a stable and more predictable system to benefit your customers.