Time-to-First-Move Distribution(2.4.9)

Most backlog discussions focus on why work doesn't finish on time. This visual asks an earlier question: why does it take so long for work to start? The time between a ticket being created and someone first picking it up is invisible in most reports — but it is often where a large chunk of total cycle time is lost.

A long right tail in this distribution — many tickets waiting 3, 7, or more days before anyone acts on them — is a sign that the team's intake process is not working: tickets are created but not triaged, prioritized, or assigned quickly enough to keep the queue from growing.

What you can conclude

• When the median ticket falls in the 48–72h band or slower, most tickets are waiting more than two days before anyone acts on them. Whether that is acceptable is a question for the team that owns the queue.
• When the P90 ticket sits several bands above the median ticket, a subset of tickets is waiting far longer than the typical one. Worth asking which tickets those are, and whether the gap is deliberate.
• A tight, left-skewed distribution (most tickets picked up within 24 hours) indicates a well-functioning backlog process with regular grooming and clear ownership.
• When the 168h+ bucket is close in size to the 0–24h bucket, the team has a bimodal intake pattern — some tickets are picked up immediately while others are systematically ignored. This is more concerning than a uniformly slow intake.

How this chart works

Histogram showing the distribution of time (in hours) from issue creation to first status transition out of To Do or Backlog. Buckets: 0–24h, 24–48h, 48–72h, 72–168h (3–7 days), 168h+ (7+ days). The 0–24h bucket is shown in teal (fast intake) and the 168h+ bucket in coral (problematic delay). Each bar is labeled with its percentage of total tickets. Two badges above the chart name the band the median ticket falls in and the band the 90th-percentile ticket falls in. Both are read off this same histogram by ticket rank, so a band is the finest resolution the measure supports. Neither badge is an average of the per-project percentiles.

When the 168h+ bucket exceeds 20% of all tickets, a coral long-tail alert banner is shown.

Use the project filter to compare intake responsiveness across teams. The date filter selects which rows are drawn, keeping the projects and buckets whose tickets were created during the period; the median and P90 shown for a bucket are computed over all of that project's tickets in it, not only the ones inside the period.