5 Best Practices for Utilizing Time-in-Status in Jira Projects

As a Technical Project Manager, one of the hardest questions to answer is often the simplest: "Why is this taking so long?" Your Jira board shows plenty of activity, but the real story is hidden in the wait times—the days an issue spends sitting idle between statuses. To find those hidden delays and truly understand your project's flow, you need the right tool.

That's where Jira's often-overlooked Time-in-Status report comes in. This guide will provide 5 practical best practices for using this report to diagnose bottlenecks, have data-driven conversations, and make tangible improvements to your team's workflow.

What is the Time-in-Status Report (and Why Should TPMs Care About it)?

Think of the Time-in-Status report as a diagnostic tool for your project's process. It calculates and displays the total time an issue spends in each status of your workflow, from "To Do" all the way to "Done."

For a TPM, this data is incredibly valuable. It helps you:

• Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint the exact stages where work gets stuck or slows down.

• Validate Team Feedback: When your team says a process is slow, this report provides the objective data to back it up.

• Improve Forecasting: Understanding your typical wait times allows you to make more realistic and reliable project forecasts.

• Drive Continuous Improvement: It gives you concrete data to start conversations about process changes.

Also read: How to Track Time Spent in Status in Jira (Without Micromanaging)?

The 5 Best Practices for Making Time-in-Status Work for You

Image Source: Atlassian

A report is only useful if you know how to use it correctly. Here are five best practices to get the most value from your Time-in-Status data.

1. Ensure Your Workflow Statuses Are Clear

This is the most critical first step. If your workflow statuses are vague or used inconsistently, your report will be inaccurate. "Garbage in, garbage out."

Work with your team to define a clear, simple workflow. Crucially, distinguish between "active" work states (like "In Progress" or "In Testing") and "queued" wait states (like "Ready for Review," "Blocked," or "Waiting for Deployment"). This distinction is essential for proper analysis.

2. Focus on "Wait" States, Not Just "Active" States

While it's useful to know how long work is actively being done, the most significant opportunities for improvement are usually hidden in the "wait" states. This idle time represents pure process inefficiency.

If issues are spending a large amount of time in "Ready for QA," it points to a testing bottleneck. If they're stuck in "Waiting for Approval," it signals a handoff or stakeholder issue. Targeting these queues is the fastest way to improve your overall flow.

3. Use Averages to Set Baselines and Spot Trends

Analyzing a single issue's Time-in-Status can be misleading. The real power comes from aggregating the data to see averages and trends over time.

Calculate the average time issues spend in each status over a set period (e.g., a month or a quarter) to establish your baseline. Then, monitor that average. Is the average time "In Review" slowly increasing? This trend is a clear signal that you need to investigate the review process.

4. Investigate Why a Status Has High Time (Don't Assume)

Your report shows that issues spend an average of four days in "Blocked." The data tells you what is happening, but it doesn't tell you why. As a TPM, your job is to use this data to start a conversation.

A high Time-in-Status could have many root causes:

• Process Issues: "Our approval process requires too many sign-offs."

• Resource Constraints: "The QA team is overloaded this quarter."

• External Dependencies: "We're constantly waiting for another team to finish their part."

• Communication Gaps: This is especially common in global teams. An issue might be stuck because the description, written in one language, isn't clear to a developer who speaks another. Without proper multilingual support, simple clarifications can cause days of delay. Improving Jira multilingual support by using plugins or establishing translation protocols can be a direct solution to reducing this specific type of process waste.

5. Combine Time-in-Status with Other Metrics for Context

Time-in-Status is powerful, but it shouldn't be used in isolation. For a complete picture, analyze it alongside other key flow metrics.

For example, a low Time-in-Status for "In Progress" might seem positive. But if your overall Cycle Time (total time from start to finish) remains high, it confirms that the problem isn't active work but the wait times between active work.

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Manually correlating these different data points from Jira can be tedious. This is where the Middleware Jira Plugin simplifies your analysis. It automatically synthesizes data from across your project into a single, clear dashboard.

You can view your Time-in-Status trends right alongside your Cycle Time, Throughput, and other flow metrics, giving you the full context you need to make informed decisions without spending hours manually compiling data.

How to Calculate Time in Status in Jira Effectively?

Manually calculating how long issues spend in each Jira status is a tedious and often inaccurate process. This is where a dedicated add-on for "Time in Status" becomes essential, as it automates this data collection to provide a suite of sophisticated reports.

Instead of just a single metric, these tools can generate a variety of reports to give you a comprehensive view of your workflow, including:

• Assignee Time: How long an issue is assigned to each person.

• Average Time: The average duration issues spend in each status.

• Status Entrance Date: When an issue first entered a particular status.

• Cycle and Lead Time: Customized reports tracking the total time for your specific workflows.

• and many others like Status Count and Transition Count.

Going Deeper with Advanced Analysis

For teams that need to dig deeper than standard reports, two features are particularly powerful:

1. Custom Reports with Pivot Tables: For truly in-depth analysis, pivot table functionality is a game-changer. It allows you to move beyond pre-built reports and create your own by aggregating, grouping, and summarizing your issue data in custom ways. This is invaluable for identifying specific patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed and for answering questions unique to your team’s goals.

2. The Classic Time in Status Report: The most frequently used report, "Time in Status," establishes exactly how long issues have spent in any particular column.

Image Source: Atlassian

A key benefit of using an add-on is the ability to configure this report to reflect your team's actual working hours (e.g., excluding weekends and holidays) and to display the data in the format you prefer (days, hours, etc.). This data can also be instantly visualized as a chart for easier analysis.

Using Trendlines to Optimize Your Workflow

One of the most strategic features offered by advanced Jira reporting is the ability to add a trendline to your column charts.

While a standard chart shows you what happened in the past, a trendline helps you predict future patterns. This allows your team to shift from being reactive to proactive. With a trendline, you can:

• Spot inefficiencies early before they escalate into major problems.

• Improve forecasting by predicting future performance based on real data.

• Make data-driven decisions founded on solid trends, not just guesswork.

• Optimize resource allocation to prevent team overload.

By incorporating trendlines into your charts, you gain powerful insights into your team's time spent in status, enabling you to streamline your workflow for smoother project execution.

Conclusion: Using Data to Drive Improvement

The Time-in-Status report is a practical tool for any TPM who wants to move from guesswork to data-informed project management. By using it to identify bottlenecks, validate team feedback, and facilitate collaborative problem-solving, you can guide your team toward a more efficient, predictable, and less stressful workflow. The goal is always to improve the system, not to assign blame.

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FAQs

Q1: How do I access the Time-in-Status report in Jira?

In your Jira project, navigate to the "Reports" tab in the left-hand menu. From there, select the "Time in Status" report. You can then configure it for the specific statuses, timeframes, and projects/filters you want to analyze.

Q2: What is a "good" or "bad" Time-in-Status?

There is no universal standard. What's "good" is highly dependent on your team, your product's complexity, and your specific workflow. The best approach is to establish your own team's baseline and then focus on improving from there. A rising trend in a wait-state is always worth investigating.

Q3: How is this different from Cycle Time?

• Time-in-Status breaks down the time spent in each individual column of your workflow.

• Cycle Time measures the total time an issue takes from when work begins until it is completed. Think of it this way: Time-in-Status is the diagnostic tool you use to figure out why your Cycle Time is high.

Q4: Can I use this report to measure how productive individual developers are?

No, and this is a critical point**.** This report should never be used to measure or compare individual performance. Doing so will lead to flawed conclusions and damage team morale. It does not account for task complexity, collaboration time, or external blockers. Time-in-Status is a tool for analyzing and improving your process, not for evaluating people.