Focus summary

The focus summary allows you to easily explore what your teams and organization are spending the most effort (FTEs) on.

Overview

The focus summary helps you understand where your teams are investing their time. By measuring effort in full-time equivalent (FTE) months across issues, initiatives, and contributors, you get a clear picture of what's actually being worked on – and how that effort is trending over time.

What you can see in the focus summary

Above the table, you'll see a panel showing total effort for the selected team and timeframe, measured in full-time equivalent (FTE) months. This is the full capacity in FTE months.

When you apply additional filters, a filtered effort panel shows how much of the total capacity matches all your current filters and is displayed in the table.

The table displays all issues matching your selected timeframe, team, and filters. Each issue can be expanded to reveal matching child issues.

For each issue, you'll see:

• Issue details

  • Issue name and key

  • Status

  • Time spent in progress

  • Total child issues

  • Lifetime effort: Total FTE months invested since the issue was created

• Contributors: Individual contributors with effort attributed to the issue

• Effort breakdown: FTE months invested in the issue and its percentage share among all shown work (during the selected timeframe)

  • Includes a monthly trend breakdown for the selected timeframe

Interpreting effort trends

• Inactivity: The effort column displays the total number of FTE months during the selected timeframe, while the trend column indicates whether any months were inactive. This can surface a lack of focus in key initiatives.

• Winding up vs. winding down: The shape of the trend breakdown can also tell you whether a project is starting or ending. Generally, in cross-team projects, effort tends to be highest when multiple teams are contributing simultaneously, and towards the end, most teams have already moved on to other projects.

Focus summary options

Filtering the view

The primary filters in the focus summary are team and timeframe. You can also narrow down the view using all standard issue filters available in Swarmia - you can find most of them under "More filters…"

Grouping by initiative

By default, issues are grouped by the highest level in your issue hierarchy. Alternatively, you can group work by Swarmia initiatives.

Swarmia initiatives are not mutually exclusive; a single issue can belong to multiple initiatives, depending on how they have been defined. This means the total focus percentages in the view may exceed 100%.

Showing unlinked pull requests

By default, unlinked pull requests are hidden from the focus summary. To see how much focus is dedicated to unlinked PRs, toggle them on under "More filters…"

Example: Show the latest active stories on a timeline

Filters let you shape the focus summary into the view you need. As an example, you can see what stories a team has been working on over the past 6 months.

1. Open "More filters…" and set Issue type to Story, so the view shows story-level work.

2. Switch the layout to Activity with the layout selector. This plots effort over time instead of showing the table.

3. Set the timeframe to the last 6 months.

4. Set the time bucket to Week, so each column covers one week.

5. Sort the rows by Last activity using the sort control, to bring the most recently active stories to the top.

You'll get a weekly timeline of story-level work across the past year, with the most recently active stories on top.