Kanban Metrics

Kanban Metrics: How do you measure your deliverable efficiency in Kanban? How do you know how much efficient is your Kanban? Here are some metrics

Video: Kanban Metrics

Cycle Time

Cycle Time is the metric that directly measures how long it takes your team to deliver a task. Low cycle times mean your team is working efficiently, high cycle times indicate that something is stalling your process. Keeping your cycle times down keeps your lead times down, and leads to high customer satisfaction.

Throughput

Whereas cycle time measures how long it takes an individual task to go through your process, the throughput metric in Kanban measures the total amount of work delivered in a certain time period. Throughput only measures completed work items – nothing that is still in progress gets counted.

WIP Limit

A key component of the Kanban Method is limiting Work In Progress (WIP) to improve your team’s efficiency. Think about it – do you get work faster when you split your attention between many tasks, or when you choose one to focus on?

The optimum WIP limit for your team will depend on several factors such as the size of your team, however a good place to start is setting the limit at around the number of people in your team – this way, everyone can focus on one task at a time

Team Performance

Little’s Law shows the relationship between the three basic flow metrics, and that changing one will have an effect on the other two. For example, for a reduction in cycle time, WIP must decrease.

Short cycle times and high levels of throughput are signs of good team performance, but another thing to look out for is consistency. From the cycle time histogram and throughput histogram, you can not only see the average value of your Kanban metrics but also how this data is distributed over a period of time. When your values are spread over a smaller range, your future predictions are naturally more accurate.

Cumulative Flow Diagram

The cumulative flow diagram shows the distribution of tasks in each of the process states, accumulating over time. Each colored band indicates how many tasks are present in each stage of the process at a given time. Approximate average cycle time can be calculated straight from the diagram, but the real benefit of the CFD is how quickly you can get a visual assessment of the stability of your process.

Bottleneck

The biggest red flag that your performance is about to suffer is the bottleneck – increasing work that is not being completed. The bottleneck signals that your team does not have the resource capacity to handle the amount of work assigned to them in a timely manner.