Understand flow and quality metrics
Cycle time, lead time, throughput, work in progress, ticket age and bugs: how each dashboard block is calculated.
Where the figures come from
Manifst records every status change of a ticket, with its date. Flow metrics are calculated from this history, over the last 90 days. The type of each column (to do, in progress, in review, blocked, done) gives the status its meaning: changing a column's type also changes how the past is calculated.
Definitions
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Cycle time | from the first move to "in progress" or "in review" until completion |
| Lead time | from the ticket's creation until completion, backlog wait included |
| Throughput | the number of tickets completed per full week |
| Work in progress | tickets in progress, in review, or blocked after starting |
| Age | how long an in-progress ticket has been under way |
| Bugs | open and closed tickets whose type looks like a defect (bug, anomaly, incident, regression…) |
A ticket blocked before it started is not considered started. A ticket created already done (import, project copy) does not count in throughput.
"Likely" and "safe"
Times are not averages, which a single very long ticket is enough to distort:
- Likely time: one ticket in two is completed within this time or less;
- Safe time: 85% of tickets are completed within this time or less. It is the time to give to someone who asks "how long for this ticket?".
In the work-in-progress age block, a ticket turns orange beyond the likely time, and red beyond the safe time: the signal that it needs attention.
Why some blocks stay empty
At least 5 completed tickets are needed to calculate a time. And status history does not go back before it was switched on: each block says since when it has data.
These metrics are available on every plan for one project. Consolidating them across several projects, with the dashboard's Projects filter, requires the Portfolio plan.
For the forecast of when work packages will finish, see How Manifst forecasts when a work package will finish.