Cumulative flow diagram
With the latest Teamhood release, you can add cumulative flow diagrams to your dashboards. Or have it shown by default in Board overview.
How to add a cumulative flow diagram to dashboard?
To add cumulative flow diagram you need to:
- Open Dashboard view
- Click “Add widget” button
- Choose Cumulative flow diagram
- Select desirable period for which you want to inspect the data
What is a Cumulative Flow Diagram?
A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD for short) is a stacked area chart that tracks the number of work items in each stage of a workflow over time.
The X-axis represents time (days, weeks, months), while the Y-axis is configurable and can represent item count, estimation sum or budget sum. Each colored band in the chart corresponds to a specific stage of the workflow, such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” or “Done.” The width of each band indicates the volume of work in that stage at any given time.
How to interpret a cumulative flow diagram?
There are few things that you should be looking for in any cumulative flow diagram.
- Flat Bands: Indicate a stable workflow with consistent throughput.
- Widening Bands: Signal bottlenecks or delays in a particular stage.
- Narrowing Bands: Show improved efficiency or faster processing.
- Slope of the “Done” Line: Reflects the team’s delivery rate—steeper slopes mean faster completion.
- Horizontal distance between input and output statuses. The width of the gap indicates the cycle time of work.
⚠️ Selecting a period is very important because only items created during that period will be shown/represented in the chart.
Here is another CFD example from our marketing team, who work in weekly sprints. By looking at this diagram, we can instantly spot that from time to time, things tend to pile up in “For review” status (pink). The team could improve by prioritizing finishing work instead of starting new. Which, in reality, means going through items requiring review first and only then pulling new work.
Another conclusion can be made that “working” status shows a healthy band through out the most period except two points. First one during Christmas holiday when more work was put into review and not started. The second is the most recent, where it seems that backlog as well as priority statuses are packed more than usual, while working status does not indicate higher capacity of the team. This most likely means delayed or unfinished work by the end of the week.
Using AI to cut corners
You can cut the hassle and use AI with vision analysis tools to interpret cumulative flow chart for you. We have already tried it ourselves with Claude AI. Results are sophisticated and accurate. What we did is we took a print-screen of cumulative flow diagram for one of our development boards and asked Claude AI to provide interpretations how our team is doing based on the chart data. See for yourself what has been provided. Some of the comments are common sense and can be omitted (like numbers 1, 2 and 3). But the rest of points are valuable insights.
If you are not using Claude, you can use any other similar alternative like ChatGPT or Deepseek.
Prompt we used.
Please analyze this cumulative flow diagram and draw conclusions if you find strong evidence. This represents a single product team working on continuous kanban flow with periodic releases. You can even draw annotations on top of this diagram for better visual explanation.
Need help or still unsure?
Need help to set up your charts or advice what’s the best way to measure things around Teamhood?