Compare team delivery: separating a real slowdown from a shared one
Only lives on the Comparison view — pick two or more boards and this draws one delivered-items line per board over time, with a single freeze/holiday overlay shared across every line, plus a scorecard totalling delivered items per team. Its whole job is answering one question cleanly: is that dip because the team slowed down, or because everyone did?
| Board | Delivered (total) |
|---|---|
| Payments | 218 |
| Growth | 176 |
| Platform | 94 |
Delivered items per week, three boards, one shared freeze band.
Delivered totals greyed — this board set mixes Jira and Azure DevOps, so item counts aren't comparable across tools.
What it measures, and where the data comes from
One line per board: items marked done, counted weekly, over the selected window. Layered on top is a single shared overlay marking company holidays, code freezes, or migration windows — drawn once, not per board, so a dip that lines up with it reads as expected rather than alarming. The scorecard restates the same data as one total-delivered number per team.
- Jira — issues transitioning to a done-category status, per project.
- Azure DevOps — work items closing out, from connected projects.
Higher is better on the lines. But a raw item count from Jira and a raw item count from ADO aren't counting the same unit of work — different default issue types, different splitting conventions — so whenever the compared boards mix providers, the totals row greys out. Trend shape is always safe to compare; the exact total isn't, across that boundary.
How to read it
Check the shared overlay before you react to any dip. If every line sags in the same window and that window has a freeze band under it, that's the whole company slowing down together for a known reason — nothing to dig into. The overlay exists specifically so you don't send a "why did delivery drop" message about a week everyone already knew was a freeze.
What actually deserves attention is a board diverging from the pack outside that band — one line sagging while the others hold their trend. That's the one worth a closer look, because it isn't explained by anything shared.
What it tells you over time
Over a quarter, this widget is how you tell a real capacity problem from seasonal noise. A team whose line consistently sits below its peers, freeze windows aside, has a structural throughput gap worth investing in. A team whose line only dips inside shared freeze bands is healthy — don't let a single freeze-week snapshot get mistaken for a trend.
Example situations
1. A quarter-end dip that's actually fine
All three lines dip together, right under the shared freeze band.
What you're seeing: all three boards dip in the same two-week window, and that window sits directly under the shared freeze band. Every team recovers to its prior trend right after.
How to react: nothing to investigate here. This is the exact case the shared overlay exists for — confirming a dip is explained rather than launching an inquiry into why three teams all "slowed down" during a planned code freeze.
2. One team diverges downward with no freeze in sight
Platform sagging outside any freeze window while Payments and Growth hold steady.
What you're seeing: no freeze band anywhere on this chart, yet Platform's line has been sliding down for six weeks while Payments and Growth stay flat. This is a real, team-specific slowdown — there's nothing shared to blame it on.
How to react: this is your signal to go look at Platform specifically, not to wait for it to self-correct. Cross-reference with Compare: Flow for the same boards — if Platform's cycle time is climbing too, you've likely found a capacity or blocker problem rather than a fewer-tickets-created problem.
Frequently asked
- How do I compare delivery across teams?
- On the Comparison view, select two or more boards. You get one delivered-items line per board over time, a single shared freeze and holiday overlay across every line, and a scorecard totalling delivered items per team.
- How can I tell a team-specific slowdown from a company-wide one?
- That is the question this view is built for. Because every board shares one calendar overlay, a dip affecting all lines at once is environmental — a freeze, a holiday, an incident — while a dip on one line alone is specific to that team.
- Why do delivered totals grey out sometimes?
- Because the boards being compared mix Jira and Azure DevOps, whose item semantics do not total meaningfully together. The per-board lines stay valid; only the combined total is suppressed.
Related widgets
- Compare: Flow — cross-checks whether a delivery dip pairs with a cycle-time climb.
- Compare: Review Quality — checks whether review bottlenecks explain a divergent team.
- Delivery Trend — the single-board version of this same delivered-items line.
- Back to the widget reference.
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