id: 1173,4
title: Metrics in kanban.
date: 2022-08-27

Metrics in kanban.

Metrics help guide evolution and set guardrails, but don’t otherwise offer much prescription.rB4

  • Lead time: Start of work to completion.
  • Delivery rate: Number of completed items per time.
  • Work-in-progress: Number of active bits of work.

Visualizing flow metrics:rY1

  • Work-in-progress: Use a cumulative flow diagram to track WIP habits and outcomes.
  • Cycle time (aka Lead Time): Scatterplots show trends of this lagging turnaround time metric.
  • Throughput: A trendline chart can help interpret rate of delivery.
  1. ↩

    Yuval Yeret, “4 Metrics To Visualize and Accelerate Flow - DZone,” May 10, 2018, https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/4-key-flow-metrics-and-how-use-them-scrums-events. (See notes.)

  2. ↩

    Susanne Bartel and Andreas Bartel, “The Official Guide to the Kanban Method,” February 2021. (See notes.)