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Cumulative Flow Chart (CFD) as an indicator of the health of your project

Translator's Preface


In the Russian-speaking professional community of process managers, there is very little literature on the Kanban method in Russian. We, the Kanbanguide.ru community, have decided to correct this injustice and will publish the most significant articles from our point of view that have influenced the development of the method.

An article by Alexei Zheglov, an accredited kanban consultant (AKC) and trainer (AKT), talks about how to track a project’s health using an accumulative flow chart and how to define work items so that the chart displays really useful information.

Cumulative Flow Chart (CFD) as an indicator of the health of your project


This is a cumulative flow chart of a healthy project:


The gray fill in the lower right is of value to the customer, delivered to him and recognized by him.

A thin orange line passes directly above it, showing the amount of current work (work in progress, WIP).

The key is how you define the work items of your project. Usually a project consists of many work items. Their number is displayed by the height of the graph along the vertical axis of the flow accumulation diagram. In the given example, it would be possible to determine the scope of the project by describing the thousands of tasks that must be completed to complete the project. The problem with this approach is that you can perform many tasks, but never complete anything recognized by the customer as the value delivered to him.

Instead, the project manager took a customer-oriented approach. This was not an easy task. Work on each element visible to the customer required the involvement of several teams of various specializations with many interdependencies. Carrying out at least one element useful to the customer through the entire chain required a daily focus on solving problems. This approach is noticeably more complicated than just starting, completing and declaring completed fifty tasks in one team (and adding another fifty tasks to the queue of another team).

The project manager achieved a short and sufficiently predictable time frame for work, with particular emphasis on delays and dependencies. He did not control the amount of work in progress (WIP) strictly, but intervened when too many work items accumulated in the middle of the workflow. As a result, the number of simultaneously executed elements was on average about 4% of the total workload and never exceeded 8%. The average element completion time was significantly less (about 4%) of the total project duration. This provided quick feedback and the possibility of adjusting the progress of work based on the results obtained from the previous delivery of value to the customer.

We formulate general recommendations for projects:

  • Define the scope of the project in terms of work elements recognized by the customer, bringing him value.
  • The completion time of an individual work item on average should be significantly less than the duration of the project as a whole. It is recommended that the ratio of the duration of the project as a whole to the time of completion of one element is not less than 10: 1. With a lower ratio, the feedback will come too late, when you have already moved too far so that it would be painless to change the direction of movement.

For example, if you are planning a one-year project, ask yourself if you are able to deliver something useful to the client at least once a month?

  • , , . (WIP), , .
  • ( , , , ), , . . , .
  • If the average completion time of a work item tends to decrease or increase, then your projections for the duration of the entire project will have the same trends. Therefore, regularly review the capabilities of your services involved in the implementation of the project, based on constantly collected data. This ensures that your project plan remains healthy or that you receive early signals of upcoming deadline problems.


Many thanks for participating in the translation artnek

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