Kanban in Action

11 Using metrics to guide improvements

This chapter covers:

• Metrics and how they can help you improve
• Some common metrics and visualizations used by kanban teams
• How to find good metrics for your team

Chapter 10 talked a lot about improvements and starting to make changes to your process in order to try to improve. We like to think about it as doing experiments that you’ve not yet validated, because you can’t really know in advance whether you’re improving or not. When conducting these experiments, you need some way of knowing whether they improve your process. To know that, you need to measure how your work works. There’s a strong community around metrics for teams using kanban and Lean. In this chapter, we’ll show you a couple of commonly ...