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Detect and Eliminate Bottlenecks dashboard

The Detect and Eliminate bottlenecks dashboard enables you to identify and eliminate bottlenecks that are hampering progress. These bottlenecks could be blocker work items that impact Agile projects, activities related to source code management or Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment that can cause potential delays, and over-assigned resources leading to bottleneck scenarios. These bottlenecks translate to delays and wasted idle time in the Value Stream flow.

Using this dashboard, project managers or Value Stream managers can identify situations causing blockages and take corrective measures to unblock issues. For example, identify projects that have high number of blocked work items and concentrate on relieving blocker dependencies, analyze and improve performance of long running builds, identify over-assigned people and reevaluate assignments to balance the workload, thereby facilitating faster delivery.

As a business stakeholder, you can find answers for some of the key business scenarios such as:

What bottlenecks are currently blocking committed work?
Which of my resources are overburdened?
What is the failure rate of projects that have failed deployments?

The Detect and Eliminate Bottlenecks dashboard consists of the following chapters:

Overview
Active Agile Project Hotspots
Active Pipeline Hotspots
Over Assigned Resources

Overview

The Overview chapter displays a snapshot view of some of the common bottlenecks, such as blockers related to project hotspots, CI/CD pipeline hotspots, and over-assigned resources. You can view key indicators that cause the bottlenecks and review opportunities and recommendations to handle the blockers.

You can get more detailed information from the individual chapters that focus on the various bottlenecks.

The following sections are displayed in this chapter:

Agile Project Bottleneck: This section displays information about the top projects containing work items that are currently either blocking or are blocked by other work items. The opportunity ranks (Blocker rank, Impact rank) indicate the top projects that you can focus on to resolve blocker dependencies.
You can also view recommendations for the top 3 projects that contain the most blocker items.
CI/CD Pipeline Bottleneck: This section displays information about the top projects having poor peer review response time, builds that have a longer running duration, and projects with failed deployments. The Opportunity ranks highlight the top projects across these problem areas and enable you to concentrate in improving the CI/CD pipeline process.
You can also view recommendations for the top 3 projects that have the longest build running time.
Over Assigned Resources: This section displays information about people resources who are over assigned with work items or tasks. It displays the number of resources who are assigned to 10 or more tasks, average age of these tasks, and details about top resources that are at risk because of over assignment.
Over Assignment is based on the number of tasks that a resource is assigned to. The default value is 10 and can be configured to suit your requirements.
You can also view recommendations for the top 3 resources that are potentially the most over assigned and you can reassign their tasks as required.

Active Agile Project Hotspots

This chapter enables you to view details about Agile projects whose work items are either blocking other projects or are affected by blocker work items. The information displayed in this chapter considers only those work items that are currently active and you can click the Filter icon icon in the top toolbar to display the Filter panel. The Filter panel supports filtering based on the Engineering Manager hierarchy (supports up to 4 levels) and enables you to view information related to specific managers.

This chapter displays the following sections:

Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on resolving bottlenecks by listing the top 3 blocker projects determined using the Blocker rank and top 3 blocked projects determined using the Impact rank.
Top Blocker Projects: Displays a grid with information about Blocker projects. Blocker projects are projects having work items blocking other work items within the same project or in other projects. This section displays the projects with the most work items blocking other work items, the most blocked work items, average duration for which the work item has been a blocker or has been blocked, resources assigned to the blocked work items, and the blocker rank that is calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in this grid and then deriving the rank. The Blocker rank indicates the opportunity of prioritizing and working on projects with the most bottlenecks.
You can also click on a project in the grid to drill down and view more details about the work items associated with the selected project.
Blocker Details: Displays information about work items that are marked as blockers. You can view details, such as Work Item number, Type, Summary, Status, number of Blocked Work Items, Avg Duration, and the number of resources assigned to the blocked work items.
Top Blocked Projects: Displays a grid with information about the top blocked projects. Blocked projects are projects having work items that are blocked by other work items within the same project or from other projects. This section displays the projects with the most work items blocked by other work items, average duration for which the work item has been blocked, resources assigned to the blocked work items, and the impact rank that is calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in this grid and then deriving the rank. The Impact rank indicates the opportunity of prioritizing and working on projects with the most blocked work items.
You can also click on a project in the grid to drill down and view more details about the work items associated with the selected project.
Blocked Details: Displays information about work items that are blocked by other work items. You can view details, such as Work Item number, Type, Summary, Status, Child and dependent work items that are blocked, Avg Duration, and the number of resources assigned to the blocked work items.

Active Pipeline Hotspots

This chapter enables you to view details about active projects that are proving to be bottlenecks due to slow peer review response, longer build durations, and failed build deployments.

The following sections are displayed in this chapter:

Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize on resolving bottlenecks by listing the top 3 source code management (SCM) projects with slow peer review responses, the top 3 CI/CD projects with longest build running duration, and the top 3 CI/CD projects with the most failed deployments. The recommendations are based on the Opportunity ranks calculated for each category of bottlenecks.
Slow Peer Review Response Last 30 Days: Displays the top SCM projects in the last 30 days that have a very poor first reaction time for code reviews. You can view details, such as the project name, number of pull requests across each project, average time to respond, and the opportunity rank calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in the grid and then deriving the rank. A lower number indicates opportunity in prioritizing the most affected project.
You can click a project in this grid to drill down and view more details about the pull requests associated with the selected project.
Peer Review Details: Displays details about pull requests that are initiated for code reviews. You can view details, such as pull request number, date when the request was initiated, name of the requestor and reviewer, and time taken by the reviewer for the first response.
Long-Running Builds Last 30 Days: Displays the top CI/CD projects in the last 30 days that have builds running for the longest duration. You can view details, such as the project name, number of build definitions associated with the project, average duration taken by the builds to complete, and the opportunity rank calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in the grid and then deriving the rank. A lower number indicates opportunity in prioritizing the most affected project.
You can click a project in this grid to drill down and view more details about the associated builds.
Build Details: Displays details about development builds that are associated with CI/CD projects. You can view details, such as the Build ID, build definition, date when the build completed, and time taken by the build to complete.
Failed Deployments Last 30 Days: Displays the top CI/CD projects in the last 30 days that have the most failed deployments thereby affecting software releases. You can view details, such as the project name, percentage of failed deployments, number of releases impacted by these failed deployments, and the opportunity rank calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in the grid and then deriving the rank. A lower number indicates opportunity in prioritizing the most affected project.
You can click a project in this grid to drill down and view more details about the associated failed deployments.
Failed Deployment Details: Displays details about deployments that have failed or not yielded any result. You can view details, such as the Deployment number, environment in which the deployment was carried out, name of the release associated with the deployment, and date when the deployment completed.

Over Assigned

This chapter enables you to view details about bottlenecks that arise from individual people having an excessive number of tasks in their backlog from the multiple systems in which they may be assigned work. Over assigning resources can create bottlenecks thereby affecting the quality and schedule releases.

The information displayed in this chapter considers only those work items and tasks that are currently open and in progress. You can click the Filter icon icon in the top toolbar to display the Filter panel using which you can view information related to specific managers (supports up to 3 levels).

The following sections are displayed in this chapter:

Recommendations: Displays recommendations to prioritize the top 5 over assigned resources determined by the Potential Over Assignment rank. The opportunities help in reviewing and adjusting assignments in order to relieve bottlenecks.
Potential Over Assigned Resources: Displays resources that have the most number of open tasks assigned to them. Tasks here can refer to any of the task types that the resource is assigned to. You can also view the level 1 manager of the resource, the number of open tasks that are currently assigned, average change percentage of assigned tasks in the current and last 4 weeks, and the Potential Over Assignment Rank calculated by summing up the ranks of individual metrics in the grid and then deriving the rank. A lower number indicates opportunity in prioritizing the most over assigned resource.
You can also click an individual person in this grid to drill down and view details related to just their tasks, in the rest of the sections.
Open Task Breakdown: Displays the list of open tasks assigned to all resources categorized based on the task category. Examples of task categories are Work Item tasks and ITSM tasks. You can expand the task category to view individual task types along with their open tasks and average age of these tasks.
You can select a specific task type to drill down and analyze the weekly trend of tasks and get more details about individual tasks.
Weekly Snapshot Trend: Displays a bar graph that provides a weekly trend of tasks based on the count of tasks at the beginning of the week, new tasks assigned during the week, and tasks that were either closed, canceled, or reassigned.
Open Task Details: Displays a grid that provides detailed information about open tasks, such as task number, category, type of task, and the date when it was last assigned to a resource.

Metrics used in this dashboard

Metric Name	Description
Active Agile Project Hotspots Blocker Opportunity Rank (Blocker Rank)	Combined rank of Blocker Work Item Count, Avg Work Item Blocked Duration (Days), number of all blocked work items rank, and number of resources affected. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to prioritize resolving the dependencies of top blocker projects
Blocker Work Items	Distinct count of work items that are blockers in a dependency relationship
Blocked Work Items	Distinct count of work items in a relationship with a Blocker work item.
Impact Rank	Combined rank of number of all Blocked Work Items Rank, Avg Work Item Blocked Duration (Days), and number of resources affected. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to prioritize resolving the blocker dependencies impacting the most blocked projects.
Long Running Builds Opportunity Rank	Combined rank of number of build definitions rank and average build actual duration. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to reduce build durations.
Avg Time to Respond (Hours)	Avg duration between the time the pull request was created to the time the reviewer first reacted.
Slow Peer Review Opportunity Rank	Combined rank of avg time to first reaction (hours) and no of pull requests. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to prioritize action to improve peer review response.
Avg Build Actual Duration (Mins)	Avg duration of Build in minutes
Failure Rate	Total Number of deployments which are unsuccessful
Failed Deployments Opportunity Rank	Combined rank of no of releases impacted and % Failed Deployment. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to prevent failed deployments.
Assigned To Potential Over Assignment Rank	Combined rank of Avg Change in Open Tasks Last 4 weeks and number of open tasks. Lower rank values indicate opportunity to review and adjust assignments for individuals who have most concurrent open tasks associated.
Resources > N Open Tasks	No of Assignees who have currently more than 'N' Open tasks associated. By default, N is configured to 10 Open tasks and can be modified to suit your requirements.
Avg Age (Days)	Avg age of Open Tasks from its Opened/ Created date to last extracted date
No. of Open Tasks	All tasks assigned to the named individual that are in OPEN state
Avg Duration (Days) - Work Item Blocked	Duration in days between the date when blocker relationship created and last extract date.
Resources Affected - All Blocked Work Items	Count distinct of resources associated to Blocked Work Items including descendants (children, grandchildren, and so on).
Child and Dependent Work Items	Count (distinct) of work items in a child relationship with a work item including descendants (children, grandchildren, and so on).
No. of Pull Requests	Count of Pull Requests from Code Review
No. of Build Definitions	Total number of Build Definitions associated with the project
Releases Impacted	Count (distinct) of Releases that experienced one or more failed deployments
No. of Open Tasks - Current Week	Number of Open tasks at end of current week.
Avg Change Last 4 Weeks	Average change in Open Tasks in previous 4 weeks including (lagging week 1 / lagging week 2 – 1) … (lagging week 4 / lagging week 5 - 1).
No. of Open Tasks	All tasks assigned to an individual and are in Open state
No. of Closed/Canceled/Reassigned - Negative	Derived metric created to illustrate the number of Closed, Canceled, or Reassigned tasks as a negative value in Weekly Snapshot Trend bar graph (the values are plotted below the X-axis)
No. of New Assigned Tasks	Number of new tasks that are assigned to a resource during the week.
No. of Open Tasks - Start of Week	Number of Open tasks at the start of week