To make your team more productive and your workflow more efficient, use Kanban.

Wait!

It’s just the beginning… You’ll gather data. Data needs analytics. Analytics must be visualized. 

And here it comes our superhero: the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD).

Since the CFD is one of the most advanced visualization tools for Lean management and it’s super cool in the agile-lean-kanban software development community, I couldn’t resist putting together my own. It’s basically built on the data you enter on my basic kanban board template (you can get it here), with a few twists.

The link to the free workbook with Kanban board and CFD is right at the bottom of the post. If you wish, scroll down straight to it and then come back to this post, it’s got some useful info on how to use the file.

The chart is embedded and updates automatically. You’ll be downloading the file in Google Sheets but, once got your own copy, you’ll see that it works like a breeze with Excel and LibreOffice Calc as well.

Next, I’ll show you how to read the CFD and, finally, I’ll end this short series on CFD for Kanban here, with the most common scenarios your CFD may be visualizing and how to use them for reducing time to market.

But for starters, wait no more and download your free copy of the Kanban Board template with CFD.

Free, easy!

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1. How to Use the Workbook

The tabs

• The blue and green tabs are the ones where you can do data entry.
• The red tabs are intended to be read-only.
• The yellow tab is a chart.

Getting Started

Get started by adding your start day, WIP limits, and project code in the settings sheet (hidden by default).

Work-item Cards

Fill out the following features for each work-item card on the kanban board sheet:

• Description: Title and summary;

• Avatar: Available in the avatar sheet (hidden by default);
• Timestamps: one for each stage of the project (to do, analyze in, analyze out, work in, work out, verify in, verify out, and done);
• Other data:
  • Assigned to-person to which the task is assigned to
  • Size-size of the task (Large, Medium, and Small)
  • Priority-priority of the task (High, Normal and Low)
  • Due on-due date of the task
  • Complete-percentage complete;
• ID: tracking ID of the task or other references to an external system (e.g. JIRA, TFS, or Git).

Cumulative Flow Diagram-Input

In the tracking data spreadsheet, edit green highlighted columns E (Title) and O (Assigned to) with reference cells to the kanban board spreadsheet for every card edited. All the other columns are populated automatically. 

Cumulative Flow Diagram

The spreadsheet cumulative flow diagram (CFD) is updated automatically, once edited the tracking data source. The weekly summary spreadsheet extract and elaborate data from tracking data spreadsheet, to present them on a weekly format in the CFD. You don’t have to change anything here neither.

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‌ Download Kanban Board Template with Cumulative Flow Diagram

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2. How to Download

In case you’re new to Google Sheets, here you’ll find how to save locally any Google Sheets file, including your kanban board spreadsheet.

Right here .

Important! Do NOT use the “Request Edit Access” method, because I can’t grant permission to edit the original.

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3. Cumulative Flow Diagram Analysis

Workflow data are necessary for understanding how your team is performing and where they need to improve. Which, ultimately, leads to a stable process that helps your organization deliver faster to market.

A CFD provides a concise visualization of the most important metrics you can use to analyze these data. However, showing you how to read the diagram in this post would have asked too much from your poor thumb (if you’re on mobile), so I opted for a dedicated article.

Right here .

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