Kanban, is renowned for its simplicity and effectiveness in managing workflows across various industries. By visualizing work, limiting work in progress, and enhancing flow, Kanban helps teams increase efficiency and improve delivery. However, to truly harness the power of Kanban, one must understand and effectively use key metrics that help us to gain insights and so improve workflow performance. This article explores the key Kanban metrics that are critical for continuous improvement and how to avoid common pitfalls in their application.
Why Metrics Matter
The Role of Metrics in Kanban: Metrics in Kanban are not just numbers; they are insights. They provide a quantitative basis for decision-making and improvement by showing bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and productivity levels. Metrics help teams to measure their progress against their goals, ensuring that improvements are grounded in real data.
Common Pitfalls in Using Metrics: While metrics are invaluable, their misuse can lead to problems. One major pitfall is the over-reliance on single metrics which can lead to skewed perceptions and decisions that might harm the process rather than help it. For instance, focusing solely on speed might encourage rushing tasks at the expense of quality. Additionally what we often see is that a different metrics are taken and used together for further calculations. This is normally ok, however a lot of times we see metrics that are per se wrong based on pure mathematics.
Balancing Metrics and Human Judgment: It’s essential to balance what the metrics tell you with professional judgement. Metrics provide a part of the story, but human context fills in the rest. For example, a sudden drop in productivity might be due to external factors like hardware issues rather than a team’s performance. Make sure to validate your metrics with other indicators and look at the whole picture and not singular metrics in isolation.
Key Kanban Metrics
Here we summarised what we think are some key Kanban metrics that everyone should track and inspect. This metrics provide a window into the process dynamics and help manage the flow of work. Here’s a look at four essential Kanban metrics:
Customer Lead Time
This metric tracks the time from when a customer request is made until the delivery is completed. It’s crucial for understanding client satisfaction and delivery efficiency.
Visualizing Customer Lead Time can be effectively done through a line graph that tracks lead time over various intervals, providing a clear view of trends and spikes.
Imagine your workflow steps for creating value to your users or customers looks like the illustration below. The customer lead time would be the time that you would need from the time that the request from a customer or opportunity was requested / created until when it is delivered (in this case when it lands in the done column).
This answers the basic question of: how long does it take to create from start to deliver one item (and so ideally create customer value).
It can also happen that different work item types have different customer lead time. This can happen because they could have different workflows, be not so complex etc. so make sure also to think about which kind of work item types you are measuring and don’t mix and match them with each other as it would give you less insights.
System Lead Time
Similar to customer lead time but focuses on the time a task is commited from start to finish within the system. It helps identify delays in the workflow. Bar charts comparing lead times across different task types can spotlight inefficiencies and prompt process adjustments.
We now have extended our example to have WIP Limits per workflow step and also signalized with a red line our commitment points.
In Kanban the System Lead Time starts whenever a work item / customer request was commited. In our example below we have defined two different commitment points one for the discovery activities (upstream) and one for the delivery activities (downstream).
The System Lead Time “ends” whenever a unbounded queue is reached. For our example this means that the first unbounded queue for the upstream is “Ready for Delivery” and so the System Lead Time stops the time there.
Delivery Rate
This measures the rate at which tasks are completed over a specific period. It’s a straightforward indicator of productivity. A histogram can show how often different rates of delivery are achieved, helping identify consistency or the lack thereof in output.
If you look at a timeframe such as a month and check out the number of items delivered in that month (we always recommend to split this up by work item type) than you have your throughput. Simple as that!
Below you see an example of a throughput of a team (monthly). The number in red are bugs delivered and the blue symbolises work items delivered.
Discard and Abort Rates
These metrics are critical for understanding waste and inefficiency. They track how often tasks are discarded or aborted. Stacked bar charts showing reasons for discards and aborts can help pinpoint problems in the workflow or task setup.
Discard Rates are normally used within upstream Kanban to show how much we discard before high cost of delivery take place. Here it is not unusual to see higher Discard Rates – this just means that we as it says discard an idea, opportunity, etc. because the value provided might be low or the costs might be too high for the impact created.
Using Metrics to Spot Patterns and Work Item Types
Analyzing trends and patterns using these metrics can reveal a lot about the process. For instance, if system lead times increase, it might indicate bottlenecks that weren’t previously apparent.
Additionally, differentiating work item types can be crucial. Not having a tail in your chart or having spikes in different areas could signalize that different work item types are here at play. Try out to identify them and see if you can find a pattern.
Urgent work items might have shorter system lead times but could disrupt the flow of regular work items. One example could be incidents that happen and need to be fixed asap and have am impact on your flow of regular work items.
By observing these metrics over time, teams can start to predict issues like bottlenecks or see the effects of process changes.
Conclusion
Kanban metrics are more than just performance indicators; they are tools for continuous improvement. By regularly measuring, analyzing, and adjusting based on these metrics, teams can significantly enhance their workflow efficiency. Like any tool, the key to success with Kanban metrics lies in their proper use—balanced with the nuances of human insight and experience.
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