Blocking Work Items
This guideline describes the blocking work items trends and report.
Main Description

Overview

The blocking work item metric is used for identifying the trend of work items that blocking you from making a progress. It can help you to identify the road blocks and  focus on removing them so that the team can move forward.

This metric is useful when there are multiple teams working together and lot of collaboration needed because of existence of interdependency among the various tasks teams are working on.

Measurement Method

Total number of planned work Items in iteration

Total number of blocking work items in iteration.

Measurement Analysis


You can use the trend chart to observe the growth of blocking work items overtime. The number of blocking work items should apporach zero as much as possible. Team should pay attention to find out the cause of blocking when the number of blocking work items remains high. You can also generate the report for blocking work items and view since when they are blocked, to further plan the corrective action.

When there are multiple teams working together collaboratively or high dependency tasks, it is a good idea to create a dependency diagram to try to avoid the road blocking in the critical path or try to remove the blocking as soon as possible.