Kanban Metrics: An Overview of the Most Important Kanban System Metrics to Track

Kanban metrics are an important part of managing a Kanban system. By understanding and tracking these metrics, you can identify areas where your process is inefficient and make improvements.

There are four main Kanban metrics:

• Cycle Time

• Lead Time

• WIP Limits

• Throughput

These metrics key insights for improving team efficiency and process effectiveness. When implemented correctly, they can improve team productivity by removing obstacles from the workflow.

Cycle Time

When used correctly, cycle time as a Kanban metric can help you predict future work delivery times. In other words, it can help you determine if you are on track to deliver all of your work on time. Cycle time can be calculated by calculating the average lead time for each task and dividing it by the number of tasks. This can be done manually on a physical task board or automatically with an online Kanban board, like Notion or Trello.

Cycle time is a great way to monitor to see how well your processes are working. This metric measures how quickly a task moves through a process. This time doesn't include the time a task spends waiting in the Kanban board. In a typical Kanban system, a new task may be in the "Requested" column for months before someone finally executes it. In order to accurately measure cycle time, you need to configure your tracking to start when new activities are moved to the section of the Kanban board indicating work has started on the task.

Cycle time can also be used to evaluate the performance of your team. A cycle time scatterplot is an excellent visual tool to help you see the trends in your team's performance.

The average cycle time in Kanban can vary depending on the particular system or process being used. However, in general, the average cycle time is shorter than in other types of systems, such as Scrum. This is due to the fact that Kanban puts an emphasis on continuous flow, which allows for faster turnaround times. Additionally, the use of Kanban boards makes it easier to track progress and identify bottlenecks, which can further help to reduce cycle times.

Cycle time is a critical metric for Kanban teams. It's a way to quantify how quickly a team completes a task. When it is low, the team is more efficient. On the other hand, if the cycle time is high, the process is stalling. In a Kanban system, low cycle times lead to lower lead times and higher customer satisfaction.

Lead Time

Lead time is the average time it takes a task to move from the beginning of the process to completion. It is an important metric because it reveals where bottlenecks are and improves the predictability of delivery.

To calculate lead time, divide the total amount of time needed to process an item into its component parts. Consider a pizza order that needs 30 minutes to be delivered to a customer. For a business, the lead time of an item indicates how long it takes to complete it from start to finish.

The lead-time measurement can help companies determine if a task is getting stuck in the queue and could take months or weeks to finish. This can help them identify capacity issues, keep a close eye on the queue, and prevent forgotten tasks. Lead time can also help you gauge the satisfaction of customers and ensure that they're getting the product or service they need.

If you want to improve your business performance, lead time and cycle time are two of the most crucial metrics to measure. By reducing lead time, you can improve your overall productivity and reduce your costs while outpacing your competitors.

WIP Limits

When assessing the capacity of your team, work-in-process limits (WIP) are an important part of your Kanban metrics. You should review WIP limits with your team regularly to see what causes WIP limits to be exceeded and whether adjustments are needed. If the WIP limit is consistently exceeded, this may indicate inefficiencies in the process.

The idea behind WIP limits is to help your work teams focus. If they feel that there is too much work in progress, they may be tempted to jump from one task to another without delivering results. Limiting WIP helps teams avoid becoming bogged down in the "Doing" stage, and improves their focus and customer satisfaction.

The WIP limit is a key metric for calculating efficiency and throughput. By measuring how many items are in progress, you can estimate the overall throughput rate of your team.

To use WIP limits, your team should have regular discussions about their workload and the amount of work that they're actively working on. If a team member is idle, they should pair up to get more work done. The WIP limit can help your team improve productivity, reduce cycle time, and resolve blockers.

Limiting the amount of work in progress can help reduce the size of a product sprint or batch. However, it's important to realize that WIP limits don't always lead to smaller batches. With the WIP limits feature in your Kanban tool of choice, you can select the stages of work that should be limited. You can also control the value of the limit.

Throughput

Throughput in Kanban refers to the number of items that can be moved through the system from start to finish within a specific time period. The goal of throughput is to maximize efficiency and minimize waste.

There are several factors that can impact throughput in a Kanban system, including the number of workers, the number of steps in the process, and the amount of time each step takes. By optimizing these factors, businesses can improve their throughput and better meet customer demand.

Throughput is an important metric to track in a Kanban system, as it can help identify areas of improvement and ensure that the system is operating at its fullest potential. By maximizing throughput, businesses can improve their overall efficiency and better serve their customers.

Tools to Monitor Your Kanban System

Let’s look at Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Blockers, which are indicators of issues within your Kanban system that come to surface when analyzing Kanban metrics.

Cumulative Flow Diagram

One of the ways to see the progress of a Kanban workflow is to use a Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). This visual representation of your workflow shows how much work is already done and what is still to be done. It's important to note that a Cumulative Flow Diagram isn't a substitute for actual metrics.

It is very helpful to understand the current state of the workflow. The Cumulative Flow Diagram helps you determine if your process is stable or needs improvement. It also reveals the areas that need continuous process improvement and improve productivity and efficiency. Here are some tips on reading a Cumulative Flow Diagram.

When you analyze the cumulative flow diagram, you can see where bottlenecks are in the process. A CFD can help you determine the best way to solve these problems. For example, it can show you how the different stages of the process affect each other. If a process is slow, you can use a CFD to help identify these bottlenecks and fix them before they become a problem.

You can use the CFD to identify bottlenecks in your throughput and measure your team's productivity. By measuring your team's throughput, you can easily see how much work each member of the team can accomplish in a certain amount of time.

Blockers

Blockers are impediments to the progress of a work item. They can be internal or external, affecting a team or a wider organization. Kanban metrics make it possible to see where these impediments are.

The key to blocker analysis is identifying the cases where impediments are causing project stalling. This type of analysis is called sensitivity analysis and can help to prioritize blockers by their impact on project delivery. If you can identify the cases where impediments are blocking work, you'll know which tasks are most impacted and which are least likely to result in a halt. If you can see that blockers are preventing progress, then the next step is to eliminate or reduce them.

When you're using a Kanban metric, you can track blocked tasks to improve the speed at which you complete tasks. Identifying blockers in your Kanban metrics helps you improve predictability and reduce risk. By categorizing your blockers into groups of similar types, you can also make it easier to detect patterns in the data. In addition to visualizing these patterns, you can also analyze the average time it takes for the work to be completed.

Blockers in Kanban metrics can have a major impact on a Kanban system's capacity to deliver. Wait stages can be the result of handoffs between stages, external resource dependency, and customer input. Flow efficiency will be negatively affected if the number of wait stages is too high.

Important Notes About Tracking Kanban Metrics

When tracking these metrics described above, it is important to track them over time. This will help you identify trends and make improvements to your process.

Additionally, it is important to track them at different levels of detail. For example, you may want to track lead time and cycle time at the task level, but also track throughput and work in progress at the project level.

By understanding and tracking these metrics, you can make improvements to your process and improve your overall efficiency.