Work that never reached the board: measuring the gap between the two
Every roadmap epic on this board, badged touched or untouched — and underneath, the finding the whole Team Focus view exists to make possible: how much of the work never appeared on this board at all.
| Epic | Status | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| PLAT-100 | touched | 31 |
| BILL-2 | touched | 12 |
| ONB-14 | touched | 4 |
| SEC-9 | no activity | 0 |
| MIG-3 | no activity | 0 |
Epics badged, with the off-board gap called out.
38 of 122 tasks never appeared on this board. They exist only in the synced source. This view reads that source, not the board rows, so the gap is visible rather than invisible.
What it measures, and where the data comes from
Two things, and the second is the reason to add the widget:
- Epic coverage. Every epic marked CAPEX on this board, badged green when at least one task attributed to it was in the window and red when none was, with the task count on hover. The condition is presence, not progress — a task attributed to the epic need not have moved or accrued any attention for the epic to badge green.
- The off-board count. How many of the window's tasks never appeared on this board at all.
How the number is calculated
Each task the source returned carries a flag for whether a corresponding board row exists. The off-board count is the tasks where it does not.
| Task | Source | On this board? | Counted in… |
|---|---|---|---|
| PLAT-118 | Jira | yes | epic coverage + totals |
| PLAT-141 | Jira | yes | epic coverage + totals |
| SUP-991 | Jira | no | off-board count + totals |
| OPS-40 | Azure DevOps | no | off-board count + totals |
On-board and off-board tasks in one population.
Two of four tasks never reached the board, so the widget reports 2 of 4 tasks never appeared on this board. Note that off-board tasks still count in the window's totals and in the attention figures — they are real work, and excluding them would reproduce exactly the blindness the widget is built to expose.
Epic attribution follows the same parent-chain walk used elsewhere: the classifier attributes a task to the nearest ancestor that is a classified board row, so an epic can be badged touched on the strength of work recorded against a sub-task several levels down. See Roadmap Epics Touched for the worked attribution example.
How to read it
Read the off-board count first, and read it as a statement about your other metrics rather than about the team. Thirty-eight of 122 tasks off-board means roughly a third of the work is invisible to every board-scoped widget in the product — so any velocity, WIP or completion figure taken from this board is a figure about two thirds of reality.
Then read the red badges. An epic with no task at all across a whole window is either not really this quarter's roadmap or is being starved. Read a green badge as the weaker claim it is: something was attributed to that epic, not that anyone advanced it.
If no epics are listed at all, that is the finding: nobody has marked which epics constitute the roadmap, and until someone does, coverage has no denominator.
What it tells you over time
A rising off-board count is usually a process drifting rather than a team misbehaving — a new intake channel that bypasses the board, a support queue that was never integrated, or an adjacent team's tickets landing in the same project. It is worth diagnosing by where the off-board tasks come from rather than by how many there are.
The same epic showing red for two consecutive windows has effectively been descoped without a decision, which is the reading to escalate.
For this widget: the ledger lists every task the source returned, on-board or not, so the off-board population is inspectable rather than a bare count. Look at the System column while you are there — a task tracked in both Jira and Azure DevOps shows as Jira + Azure DevOps, because it was merged on a normalised title.
The raw state sits next to the mapped stage deliberately: that is what lets you see how a state was interpreted and argue with it, rather than being handed a stage and asked to trust it. See the ledger reference for the full column list, or Ledger & caveats for the method behind it.
Example situations
1. A third of the work is not on the board
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| Epics touched | 9 / 11 |
| Tasks in window | 122 |
| Never appeared on this board | 38 (31%) |
Coverage looks fine; the count underneath does not.
What you're seeing: epic coverage is strong, and 31% of the work never reached the board. The roadmap is being worked and tracked; something else — very likely support or interrupt work — is being worked and not tracked. Every board-scoped metric you have been reporting is about the other 69%.
How to react: find out what the 38 tasks have in common before doing anything about the board. This is almost always one or two identifiable channels, not 38 individual oversights.
2. Two epics red for the second window running
| Epic | Q2 | Q3 |
|---|---|---|
| PLAT-100 | touched | touched |
| BILL-2 | touched | touched |
| SEC-9 | no activity | no activity |
| MIG-3 | no activity | no activity |
The same two epics, two windows apart.
What you're seeing: two epics have received no work at all for six months while remaining on the roadmap. Nobody decided to drop them; they have simply lost every prioritisation contest without the loss ever being recorded as a decision.
How to react: the widget counts "any work" rather than "enough work" precisely so that two consecutive zeroes are unambiguous. This is not a resourcing question yet — it is a question about whether these are still commitments.
Frequently asked
- Why does my board not reflect the work the team actually did?
- Board Elements Worked On measures exactly that gap. It reads the synced source rather than the board rows, so tasks that exist in Jira or Azure DevOps but never appeared on this board are counted and reported instead of being silently absent.
- What does the off-board count mean?
- How many of the window’s tasks never appeared on this board at all. They exist only in the synced source. A large count means every board-scoped metric elsewhere is measuring a subset of the real work.
- How is this different from Roadmap Epics Touched?
- Roadmap Epics Touched is the headline count — how many of the marked epics got any work. This widget shows the same epics individually, badged touched or untouched, and adds the off-board figure the tile has no room for.
- Why are no epics listed?
- Because no epic on the board is marked CAPEX, and marking epics CAPEX is what declares them the roadmap. Until at least one is marked there is nothing to badge, and the widget asks you to mark them rather than reporting an empty roadmap.
Related widgets
- Roadmap Epics Touched — the same coverage as a headline count.
- Roadmap Focus — how much attention the touched epics actually received.
- Method & Caveats — reports de-duplication and both-systems counts for the same population.
- Every Task, and Why — every task the source returned, on-board or not.
- Method: Roadmap coverage.
- Back to the widget reference.
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