Cumulative flow diagram

Where work is piling up in your workflow.

Simulator — daily throughput from today forward
3 / day
2 / day
3 / day
Current WIP (Backlog + In Prog. + Review)
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Estimated cycle time (Little's Law)
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What you are looking at

Each coloured band represents a stage in your workflow stacked over time. Stable band width means work flows through at the same rate it arrives — healthy. A widening band means work is accumulating in that stage — a bottleneck. A narrowing band means work is drying up — starvation. The simulator tab lets you drag each stage's daily throughput and watch bottleneck and starvation patterns form live. Switch between three pre-set scenarios: healthy flow, In review bottleneck and development starvation.

What most PMs miss

The CFD is only reviewed in retrospectives when the damage is already done. A widening band on day three is a five-minute conversation. The same widening band on day eight is a sprint failure. Check it in every daily standup, not once a week. The chart is only useful if you read it daily and act on the signals it shows.

The expert tip

Little's Law: Cycle Time equals WIP divided by Throughput. Reducing WIP directly reduces cycle time without speeding anyone up. If your team has twenty items in flight and completes four per day, average cycle time is five days. Reduce WIP to twelve items and cycle time drops to three days — a forty percent improvement with no additional effort. The CFD makes this relationship visible. When you can show a CFD where WIP is high and throughput is flat, you have a data-driven argument for WIP limits stronger than any process conversation.