Project management tools are full of metrics agile team can monitor. Unfortunately, most of them are "post-mortem" metrics, meaning, they are calculated when the ticket is finally done and it's too late to improve the situation.

For example, Cycle Time is useful for retrospectives, and prediction but it doesn't help the team to take action and fix the problem when it appears. Burndown chart will show that progress is low but will not tell which ticket to dive into to improve the flow.

If you are to measure just one metric in your team - make it "work item age".

Work Item Age is a metric showing how long a ticket spends in making. Depending on your flow, you can analyze it for a single kanban column like "in progress" or "in testing" or for the whole process - how long the ticket is already being processed.

There are many reasons why a ticket might be stuck:

• the actual development takes more time,

• there is an external blocker,

• somebody forgot to move the ticket to the next column after finishing working on it,

• it was assigned to the wrong person, and nobody felt responsible for monitoring its progress.

Looking at Work Item Age you can detect right away, which ticket is spending more time in a certain stage than expected. And take appropriate action to fix the problem before it's too late.

Going through the list of tickets with the highest age during daily standup will make the meeting more valuable for the team. And as a bonus, it will make the team focus on speeding up single-piece flow.

From my experience, teams that focused on decreasing work item age saw tremendous improvements in all other flow metrics as a result.