Completion rate is the total number of planned and unplanned tickets or estimates (story points/ time) completed in an interval, relative to the total number of tickets (issues or story points/ time estimates) assigned in an interval.

N.B. for greater transparency Umano also provides a breakdown in our metric charts showing Planned & Unplanned work. To access this select the Completion Rate metric and toggle the appropriate filters.

Understanding how much work is completed allows a team to plan more accurately and replicate their approach more predictably.

Knowing your completion rate is a critical input into refining your agile practices, including:

Teams can better understand patterns that relate to consistently over planning a sprint or interval, often the consequence of an unchecked ‘optimism bias’.

This also includes understanding trends on how much unplanned work is assigned mid-interval, how much of this new work is being completed and what planned work is being impacted as a result.
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There are many reasons for taking on unplanned work. It may be that the team is responding to an urgent customer request or bugs that have been prioritised for them to remediate, for example. Increased observability into unplanned work may also assist a team in knowing and more confidently managing 'hidden' work, or working more closely aligning with peers and stakeholders to plan more effectively.
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Understanding the flow of completing planned and unplanned work better helps teams set their own guardrails when planning. As an example, a team knows how many items/estimates it 'usually' completes. When planning for their next interval, as an example, they may assign 70% of their usual capacity to planned items leaving 30% capacity to absorb unplanned activity. This helps the team maintain momentum without derailing features or items that have been planned and on which stakeholders are depending. This works hand in hand with a groomed backlog, where items can easily be picked up and worked on if unplanned activities don't get assigned and the team can quickly fill latent capacity on items from the backlog.
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By better understanding and planning to your team's usual capacity for completing work, a team can reduce the event of items that aren't completed being carried over to future sprints. This creates drag and lack of focus for a team, affecting a team’s speed and progress.

Teams often glide over the importance of the energy associated with completing their work in the context of a creative process. Often, we are so busy 'doing' that we don't acknowledge or even celebrate the effort and focus applied to create or iterate something that we hope will delight our customers. This 'sense of completion' builds a feeling of satisfaction, affirms the fruits of your shared success and builds pride from effort well spent by the team. These are critical components of a team's well being, balance and keeping the dreaded burnout at bay. The joy of sharing your results also fuels the momentum that comes with then picking up something new to create!

Completion urges you forward.

Also, don't forget that sometimes things just don't get finished. It's not worth getting too upset about it.
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Teams will often set a goal for how much of their work they aim to complete that best reflects their usual completion rate and way of working, for example 70-80% of assigned items are completed within the interval.

Completion Rate consists of three components:

Practices that influence this measure