All Collections
Agile 101
Kanban Metrics: Throughput
Kanban Metrics: Throughput

Discovering the best Kanban reporting metrics that improve the flow

Pavel avatar
Written by Pavel
Updated over a week ago

Stable workflows lead to evolving motivated and productive teams. They help companies to deliver faster to market and bring greater value to clients.

How to measure the success rate of the workflow? How to improve it? 

Statistically significant data assists. This is why most of the Kanban software solutions contain powerful analytics to provide valuable workflow data. Kanban metrics help to understand how a team is performing and where they need to make improvements.

These metrics give data on the efficiency, productivity, and reliability of production processes. 

The throughput of the team is one of these metrics.

What is the throughput in Kanban? 

This key indicator in Lean project management demonstrates whether your process is productive or not. 

Throughput refers to the amount of work delivered over a specific period. It does not matter how many work items the team has in progress - throughput ignores anything unfinished.

In a Kanban reality, this can include cards per day, cards per week, or story points per iteration.

One of the simplest ways to track and visualize throughput is the Throughput Histogram. The throughput histogram visualizes frequency distribution of your throughput data. 

You get the skew of the data and the width of its spread. You also see all the values (median/mean/mode) and how all of them change over time.

Throughput evaluates team performance

With the help of the histogram, you can make quick assessments of team performance. 

The team throughput can be evaluated by the median number of tasks that were completed per unit of time (day, week, and month).

This will help you to identify trends in your team’s task delivery over time. Ideally, the throughput should increase or stay at similar levels.

If the number of tasks delivered decreases - it means that your team is encountering problems.

Your economic system should help you to determine how your team will measure throughput. You will be able to connect throughput with Cycle Time and Lead Time to get the better picture of your workflow.

Hygger suggests 

Dive deeper into more Kanban methodology terms:

Did this answer your question?