"Kanban is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process" ## Mandatory Flow Measures According to Kanban Guide there are 4 mandatory flow measures - WIP - Throughput - Work Item Age - Cycle Time To define all these metrics, it's essential to be able to quantify when work has started and when work has ended. We need to be very explicit about what "done" means for work items. ### Wip "Fundamentally, if you're not controlling WIP, you're not doing Kanban - it's fundamental". Even though controlling for WIP is fundamental, and most people associate WIP with Kanban, it's probably not the most important metric. From Little's law, system stability derives from controlling WIP. From stability is where you get a bunch of the other value people are looking for, predictability of value delivery, effectiveness and efficiency of your process, etc. Controlling WIP doesn't guarantee stability but if you're not controlling WIP, you're not going to be able to achieve system stability. ^[a lot of people think of limiting WIP on a column vs WIP across the whole system. An easier place to start might even be a single WIP limit for the whole board and then observe flow.] "A side effect of controlling WIP is that it creates a pull system." ### Throughput Throughput matters a lot to help answer the question "when will it be done for multiple items." People coming from a "theory of constraints" background tend to inherently pay more attention to throughput because they've internalized this concept. Throughput is the rate that we're getting work done - "the number of work items that 'exit' your process per unit of time." The unit of time can be anything we choose when implementing (days, weeks, months, sprints, ...). ^[you can start really easily e.g. start == moved to todo and end == done and just start there.] ### Cycle Time "Total amount of elapsed time from start time to end time". No fancy calculating of subtracting evenings, weekends, holidays. It's OK to have multiple measures of cycle time throughout the process (e.g. code review to deployed). We might have a hypothesis of what we think is valuable but we can really only validate that when we get things into the hands of our customers. The shorter the cycle time, the faster we can validate and either double down or course correct. It's not so much about getting stuff done fast but about getting that feedback as quickly as possible. ### Work Item Age / Item Aging "The one metric to rule them all" Defn: Age is the measure of elapsed time since the item has started. Cycle time is a lagging signal. You need an earlier indication that something might be going wrong. ## Service Level Expectation (SLE) "Possibly one of the most underutilized tool in Kanban" One of the most common things customers want to know is "when will it be done," which requires us to make a prediction about the future under uncertainty. This means we should take a probabilistic approach (rather than say an SLA). Example 85% that an item will flow through in 11 days or less. We want a data driven way to quantify item aging. SLE's also help drive right-sizing. When pulling an item in, the team can ask "can this work item be completed within `<SLE range>` days? " ## Resources - [Kanban Guides](https://kanbanguides.org) - [Fixing your Kanban: Kanban Metric Essentials - WIP - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmi83OnmrtA&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=5) - [Fixing your Kanban: Kanban Metric Essentials - Throughput - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42IgZs4JlWc&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=6) - [Fixing your Kanban: Kanban Metric Essentials - Cycle Time - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUbNFSa9X9g&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=8) - [Fixing your Kanban: Kanban Metric Essentials - Work Item Age - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug0nnELEQn4&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=7) - [Fixing your Kanban: What Is a Service Level Expectation (SLE) - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug0nnELEQn4&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=7) - [Fixing your Kanban: # How to Determine WIP Limits for a Kanban Team - Agile for Humans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSuuT_kBO_0&list=PL9uyGDiy_ChVfUxjc5gowNg0wW0gLFnx6&index=13) --- - Links: - Created at: [[2022-07-10]]