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 used metrics and discuss what you could learn and improve by using them.
As with most things in kanban, you want to visualize the metrics in order to know what’s happening. We’ll introduce you to a couple of common visualizations and diagrams. And we’ll show you how to create the diagrams from your workflow data and how to interpret them to see what’s going on in your process.
