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      December 7, 2022

      Understanding Cumulative Flow Diagrams

      Written by: Michelle Kerby

      Communicate Accurate Decision-Making Stories Through Data

      Rally serves as a central hub to unify the enterprise. Hundreds of global teams collaborate, plan, prioritize, and track work on a synchronized cadence. With Rally, teams visualize their work as lists, boards, or timeline views. More importantly, they also now understand how their day-to-day work aligns with the greater goals of the business.

      Rally’s unique ability to aggregate information and provide visibility into global cross-team tasks, dependencies, and risk empowers the organization to make fast, confident decisions that get better results. Rally empowers and enables people to bring data into every conversation, driving decisions both big and small.

      When the data present decision-making stories, stakeholders can confidently prioritize product strategy related to development. The organizations who adopt value stream management reach a state of evolution that celebrates survival of the fastest reality.

      Get to Know Cumulative Flow Diagrams and How to Interpret the Data in the CFD Correctly

      In our recent agile analytics educational webinar series, we shared how to read and interpret data from cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs).

      These diagrams are an excellent way to visualize multiple flow metrics in one chart. CFDs help you understand the state of work over a time period such as a single iteration. With CFDs, you can see the state of work and how long everything takes to be completed.

      CFDs are a critical diagnostics tool and revolutionize the way you perform retrospections.

      In the webinar, we also called out anonymous customer examples and explored what the charts tell us. We look at good CFDs, less than ideal CFDs, and even a couple CFDs that identify warning signs.

      We also show you how to get additional context for your charts by building custom dashboards that better explain what you’re looking at.

      Want to learn more about CFDs?

      If you want to learn more about CFDs, you’re in luck. We have two deeps dives into these charts to help you better understand them:

      • A CFD webinar that includes all the example diagrams and even a few questions asked by audience members.
      • An eBook on the topic, which you can find here.
      Tag(s): Value Stream Management , ValueOps , Rally

      Michelle Kerby

      Michelle brings more than 20 years of experience in marketing and sales leadership for Fortune 500 companies. She is passionate about solving customer challenges and creating loyal evangelists. Michelle is based in Silicon Valley.

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