Throughput in Kanban is one of the key metrics that indicates your team’s productivity. Measuring and tracking throughput enables you to understand your team’s workflow and capacity for delivering work items.
In this article, you’ll learn what throughput is in Kanban, how to calculate it, and why it’s an important metric to track.
You’ll also learn the difference between Kanban throughput and cycle time – two metrics that are often confused, as well as ways to increase throughput to improve your team’s performance.
What is Throughput in Kanban?
Throughput is one of the core metrics in the Kanban method for measuring productivity. It refers to the number of items or work units completed by your team within a certain timeframe.
Kanban throughput calculates your team’s rate of delivering completed work items from start to finish. For example, if your team completed 5 user stories last week, then your weekly throughput would be 5 user stories.
The throughput metric shows how much work your team can handle based on your current workflow process. It helps you understand your team’s capacity for taking on and finishing work.
Monitoring throughput over time provides insights into your team’s overall performance and productivity. As you make changes to your process, you can use throughput data to see if your team is increasing or decreasing their work output.
How to Calculate Throughput in Kanban
To measure throughput in Kanban, you need to calculate the number of work items your team has completed over a specific time period.
The basic formula for throughput is:
Throughput = Number of work items delivered in time period
For example, if your team completed 15 user stories over the last two weeks, your throughput for those two weeks is 15 user stories.
To calculate daily throughput, you would count the user stories finished each day. If your team completed:
- Monday: 3 user stories
- Tuesday: 2 user stories
- Wednesday: 2 user stories
- Thursday: 4 user stories
- Friday: 4 user stories
Your throughput for that week was 15 user stories. And your average daily throughput was 3 user stories per day (15 user stories / 5 days).
For accurate throughput data, make sure to only count completed work items – not those still in progress. Also, the items must be fully done based on your team’s definition to count towards throughput.
Kanban throughput can be measured in any time interval that makes sense for your Sprints – daily, weekly, monthly, etc. The most important thing is to be consistent in how you define and calculate throughput over time.
Tracking throughput metrics over several time periods allows you to forecast future performance by analyzing trends and historical data. Many teams plot throughput on run charts to visualize trends.
Why Use Throughput in Kanban?
Measuring Kanban throughput provides vital insights into your workflow’s effectiveness and your team’s ability to deliver work. It is one of the most valuable metrics for continuous improvement in Kanban processes.
Tracking throughput provides several benefits for teams using the Kanban method including:
- It helps you understand your team’s capacity for delivering work items in a given time period based on your current process.
- Analyzing throughput metrics over time gives visibility into trends in your team’s productivity and performance.
- Increases or decreases in throughput allow you to see the impact of changes made to your workflow or process policies.
- Throughput establishes a baseline for your team’s output that can be used to set realistic expectations and make accurate delivery forecasts.
- Comparing throughput across teams working on different projects highlights which teams are more efficient in converting work items to done.
- Maximizing throughput helps you improve flow and reduce bottlenecks in your software development lifecycle.
How to Increase Throughput in Kanban
If your team’s throughput starts to decline or is lower than desired, there are several ways you can help increase throughput in your Kanban system including:
Reduce Work in Progress (WIP)
A lower work in progress has been proven to boost throughput. Keeping WIP limited ensures your team focuses on finishing existing work before starting new items. Therefore, analyze your workflow to identify excess WIP that could be reduced.
Optimize Workflow
Smoothing workflow maximizes throughput. So, identify parts of your workflow causing delays through value stream mapping, then eliminate wait times, handoffs, and other waste.
Set Up Pull Systems
Use pull systems to limit work starting only when capacity is available to work on it. This prevents overloading resources and improves throughput.
Increase Automation
Automating manual tasks speeds up work and provides more time for high-value work that increases throughput. Look for opportunities to automate testing, deployments, reporting, etc.
Improve Team Skills
Provide training and development opportunities to boost your team members’ skills as more skilled teams produce higher quality work faster, which drives throughput.
Difference Between Kanban Throughput vs Cycle Time
Though related, throughput and cycle time are two distinct metrics in Kanban:
- Throughput indicates your team’s overall output and productivity by measuring the number of work items completed in a time period.
- Cycle time measures the speed of delivery by tracking how long it takes for individual work items to move through the workflow from start to finish.
The core difference is throughput calculates total work done in a timeframe and cycle time focuses on individual item flow speed. Optimizing both is important as a higher throughput with shorter cycle times maximizes work output and efficiency.
Conclusion
Understanding and optimizing throughput is key for boosting team productivity in Kanban. By tracking throughput metrics over time, you gain insights into your team’s capacity for delivering work items.
You can identify trends and issues and make process improvements to increase throughput as a combination of high throughput with short cycle times leads to greater efficiency.
Use the data and visualizations from throughput calculations to remove bottlenecks and establish a smooth, productive workflow.
With the right focus on maximizing throughput, your Kanban processes will achieve better flow and improved output.
