Status Bottleneck Heatmap(2.7.7)

This is the portfolio-level view of workflow speed. Rather than looking at one project at a time, the heatmap shows every project and every status simultaneously — so you can immediately spot the combinations that are slowest and understand whether a bottleneck is isolated or systemic.

A dark cell at “TECH / In Review” means that project’s review stage is significantly slower than others. A whole column dark means the entire team is slow at that stage. A whole row dark means one project is slow everywhere.

What you can conclude

• A single dark cell is specific to one project: something about how that team handles that stage is different.
• A dark column (same status across many projects) points to a shared process constraint — the bottleneck is not in any one team.
• A dark row (all stages slow for one project) means that project is slower at every stage; a reviewer could ask what is different about how it works.

How this chart works

Heatmap with projects on one axis and workflow statuses on the other. Cell color intensity encodes average hours spent in that status — lighter means faster, darker means slower. This view always shows the full portfolio; use the date filter to compare different time periods.

What this measures, and what it leaves out

• The clock runs between one status change and the next, so a cell only counts issues that later left that status. Work sitting there right now contributes nothing until it moves, which means a stage currently holding blocked work can read lighter than it deserves.

• No upper limit is applied to a wait. A genuinely long wait is reported at its full length and counts toward the cell average, so one issue that waited months can darken a cell by itself.

• Each cell carries the number of transitions behind it. A dark cell resting on one or two measurements is a single slow item worth opening, not a systemic constraint — the row, column and cell patterns above only carry their stated meaning where the counts are comparable.

• An empty cell and a cell reading 0.0h are different findings. A blank cell means no issue left that status in this project during the window, so there is nothing to time; it carries the neutral No data swatch and is excluded from the color scale entirely. A cell reading 0.0h is a measurement — transitions were recorded and the average wait rounded to under six minutes — and it sits at the fast end of the scale like any other measured value. Reading a blank as a fast stage is the mistake this distinction exists to prevent.

A status is identified by its Jira status id, so a renamed status is one column under its current name, and a wait that spans an issue's move between projects is measured rather than dropped, in the project where the issue left the status.