Include “Flagged” Status in Flow Efficiency Calculation

Feature Requests
1

Hi team,

I’d like to suggest a feature enhancement for the flow efficiency metric calculation in your plugin. Currently, it seems that flow efficiency is calculated without taking into account whether a task has been flagged (i.e., marked with the “Flagged” field in Jira).

Use case:

In our workflow, we use the “Flagged” field to indicate blocked or paused work. These flagged periods should ideally be excluded from active work time when calculating flow efficiency, as they do not represent productive effort.

Proposed enhancement:

Please consider modifying the flow efficiency logic to subtract time during which an issue is flagged from the “active” time, similar to how some tools exclude blocked status. This would allow the flow efficiency metric to more accurately reflect real productivity and help teams identify and reduce actual inefficiencies.

Benefits:

  • More accurate flow efficiency measurements
  • Better visibility into process bottlenecks
  • Aligns with common agile practices of tracking blocked time

Thanks for considering this improvement!

1 Like
2

Hello!

Thank you for your suggestion! I understand the importance of accounting for blocked tasks when analyzing workflow efficiency.

Unfortunately, in the current version of the plugin, we have certain limitations:

  1. The data we use for displaying metrics does not include information about whether a task is flagged in Jira. The plugin works with data on task movements between columns, but does not have access to flag information.
  2. In the current plugin architecture, I don’t yet see a way to safely obtain this information without significantly impacting performance. Additional requests could considerably slow down the plugin’s operation and also create potential privacy concerns, since one of JMP’s key advantages is working with anonymized data locally on the user’s computer.

As an alternative solution, I’ve seen implementations where task blockages were reflected through:

  • Moving tasks to special statuses (e.g., a “Blocked” column)
  • Creating separate blocker issues linked to the main tasks

However, the second approach wouldn’t allow automatic calculation of Flow Efficiency through the plugin — such calculations would need to be done manually.

I completely agree with you that this is an important enhancement, and I’ll be happy to implement it when we find an optimal way to collect and process flag information without compromising performance and data security.