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

Overview

You can use the Blocking Work Item metric to identify the trend of work items that are blocking you from making 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 a lot of collaboration is needed because of the existence of interdependency among the various tasks that teams are working on.

Measurement Method

Total number of planned work items in an iteration

Total number of blocking work items in an 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 approach zero as much as possible. When the number of blocking work items remains high, your team should determine what is causing the blocking. You can also generate the report for blocking work items, and then view it to see how long they have been blocked. This information can help you to further plan the corrective action.

When there are multiple teams working together collaboratively or on 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.