Avium SignalsTeam tier and above

Workflow Sankey — how your tickets actually flow vs. how you think they do

Your Jira workflow on paper has 6 statuses. In practice it has 23 transitions, 4 of them backwards. Avium draws the picture nobody else does.

Avium SignalsWorkflow / Ping-Pong

Work isn’t a straight line — Avium counts the backward hops that quietly burn the sprint.

The map vs the territory

Every team has a Jira workflow diagram somewhere. To Do → In Progress → Review → QA → Done. Clean. Linear.

The actual paths tickets take don't look like that. Tickets jump from In Progress straight to Done (no review). Tickets bounce from Review back to In Progress. Tickets sit in QA for a week then move to a status nobody documented. The workflow on paper bears no relation to the workflow in fact.

How teams try to understand their workflow

Without a process-mining tool, you can't really:

Asking the team how the workflow works — gets you the textbook version, not the actual one.
Inspecting Jira transitions in the workflow editor — shows you what's POSSIBLE, not what's HAPPENING.
Building a Sankey by hand from sprint reports — possible if you have 4 hours and a data analyst; impossible weekly.
Enterprise process-mining tools (Celonis, Apromore) — built for compliance teams, priced for procurement departments.

How Avium Signals computes the workflow Sankey

Avium reads every ticket status transition in your data and aggregates them into a flow diagram.

Nodes: each unique Jira status that tickets actually entered (not just the ones the workflow editor allows).
Edges: each transition between statuses, weighted by how many tickets walked that path.
Backward edges flagged in red: a path from Done back to In Progress is a reopen; a path from Review back to In Progress is a rejected handback. Both are usually invisible in the standard reports.
Phantom statuses: statuses that exist in your Jira but no ticket has been in for 90+ days. The workflow is more complex than it needs to be.

Who reads this Signal

Scrum masters

First time you see this you'll spot at least one transition that shouldn't be happening. The Sankey makes it impossible to ignore.

Agile coaches

Process-mining was historically a six-figure software purchase. Now it's a tab in Avium. Show the team their actual workflow; the conversation about cleanup writes itself.

Engineering managers

Identifies the steps your team is skipping (often: code review). Sometimes intentional; sometimes a discipline problem.

VPs of engineering

Compare workflow shapes across teams. Teams whose Sankey looks like spaghetti consistently underperform teams whose Sankey looks linear.

See your real workflow

Once your work management tool is connected (Jira today, more integrations on the way), Avium renders the Sankey within seconds. Available on Team; the AI Briefing layer on Business can interpret the diagram in plain English ('your team is skipping review on 40% of tickets').

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Related Avium Signals

Ping-Pong Detection

Some tickets go forward. Some go in circles. Avium tells you which.

Flow Efficiency

A ticket takes 8 days to ship. Two of those days are someone working on it. Six are waiting. Avium tells you which is which.

Time in Status

Your team isn't slow. Your tickets are sitting somewhere. Avium tells you which somewhere.