Track lead and cycle times of individual tasks

In these last release notes for the year 2020, we wanted to highlight the new feature that allows tracking timings of individual tasks. That includes tracking lead and cycle times but also the amount of time a task has spent on any individual workflow state. That information is now available for all tasks, including those that are not yet completed.

Drilling in to the task details

When you drill in to individual tasks by clicking through in any of your dashboard screens that provides click throughs (e.g. Completed Tasks in this example), you’ll notice there’s a now a question mark displayed for each item in the list.

When you hover a mouse over the question mark, a tooltip opens showing all the steps that the task took during its journey through the workflow, and how long it stayed in each individual workflow state:

Let’s take a closer look at that tooltip:

The task started from the Sprint backlog and progressed from Doing to Done👏. For each step, the time that the tasks stayed in that specific state is shown above the timeline, and the date when it arrived to that state is shown below. In this case, the task spent 3 days and 23 hours in the Sprint backlog before it was moved to the Doing state. It spent 3 days and 16 hours in Doing before it was moved to Done👏 on Dec 21st.

Since Screenful does not limit your workflow to any specific steps, you can see the steps of your own specific workflow. Here’s an example of a slightly more complex workflow:

In this case the workflow contains the steps Next Up, Sprint backlog, Doing, In review 🔍, Waiting for deployment, and Done 👏.

If you look at the above steps closely, you can see that on December 17th, the task moved from In review 🔍 back to Doing, and then back to In review 🔍 on December 24th. What could be the reason for that? This is an example of a task that failed the initial review and was assigned back to the developer for fixing. After the required fixes were done, it was moved to Waiting for deployment on Dec 17, and eventually to Done 👏 on Dec 22.

Available in all dashboards and custom charts

Previously we provided timing information in the Timing screen only. Now these tooltips are available in all dashboard screens which have click throughs to individual tasks.

Here’s an example when clicking through from the Overview, to the Cycle time breakdown, and eventually to the individual tasks in the Timing

screen:

The same timing information is also available in custom charts, including the Task list, which allows to create lists of tasks along with their lead and cycle times.

While averages are great when it comes to providing understanding across your tasks in aggregate, timings for individual tasks can complement that with more fine grained analytics of any individual task. Did it go smoothly across the workflow or did it get stuck? Did it bounce back and forth between the workflow states? Now you know.