How to read a CFD?

The Cumulative Flow Diagram, alternatively known as the CFD, is an excellent tool to determine and forecast pending projects. You can consider using it to determine the current status of the project, the percentage of work completed, its current progress, and the pending work stored in the backlog. You can read a CFD by understanding a Cumulative Flow chart, which is geared towards learning the issues in a project, cycle time of the project, and the probable completion dates of the projects. In addition, the CFD is also crucial for identifying the occurrence of bottlenecks in a project.

The above given diagram is a representation of a CFD, and it has highlighted the occurrence of tasks in individualistic stage of the process, which grows further with the passage of time. The color band represents each task in different column on a board. As apparent from the given diagram, it is apparent that the navy and blue areas indicate the incomplete tasks, the red area signifies the work in progress, and the purple area is a representation for the finished tasks.
When observing the CFD, it is highly imperative to pay heed to the red area, if it is subjected to a change with time, it shows the presence of bottlenecks in a project, which signifies that the project is more likely to be delayed.
In addition to that, the process of reading a CFD is comparatively simple and straightforward. The vertical axis given in the diagram represents the number of tasks associated with a project, and the horizontal line represents the timeline of the project. The occurrence of the curves in the diagrams indicates the number of items given in a timely perspective. The entire settings of the curves and axis are represented in a cumulative manner.
The use of reading a CFD is geared towards visualizing the process of the project and workflow across the time. This process could be utilized to score a customer-valued related work, which is furthermore inclusive of scrum and product development teams in an agile industry. In addition, familiarizing yourself with reading a CFD pertains to learning the significance of various areas of the diagrams, and the corresponding factors which influences it.

— Slimane Zouggari