Kanban metrics helps us in driving the Improvements

Kanban metrics help us to monitor the project and make our process more efficient over time. In this article, I'm gonna talk about some of the metrics which help you to identify the gaps and drive the improvements against them.

Lead Time: It helps us to measure the total time it takes for the work item to move through the value stream i.e., from the moment the work is requested by the customer to the time it's delivered by the team.

How does it help? lead time is more important than velocity because it measures the entire agile system from end to end. Reducing lead time means the entire development pipeline is becoming more efficient.

Cycle Time: Cycle time measures how long it takes a work item to get from the time it picked by the team until the time it is delivered. In simple terms, it’s how long a card stays within the Work-In-Progress (WIP) columns of our board.

How does it help? Cycle time raise a red flag when items within sprints/timeframe across our entire system are not moving forward.

Throughput: It represents the number of cards delivered in a given period of time on a specific Kanban board. The throughput strictly counts cards, it does not take into account the fact that the cards might be of different sizes.

How does it help? This metric will provide the team represented on a Kanban board a way to track their performance over time.

Cumulative Flow Diagram: It is an analytical tool and a fundamental metric of Kanban. It helps us to visualize how tasks mount up over time, together with their distribution along the process stages. It is built from different colored bands of tasks gathered in various columns. Each color represents one column - so that each band shows how many tasks sit at what stage of the process, in a given time.

How does it help? It provides quick visual identification of where process bottlenecks may be forming.