Corporate Coder

Now that we've been implementing our Kanban for over 1 month, we've got our metrics a little settled.  The system has proven it can bring down our backlog.  With focused effort you can see improvements. 

The metrics that I believe are important include the following. 

• The Kanban board (for us this shows WIP, Testing, Transport, and feedback from Customer)
• Cycle times (this show time from submission to completion from the customers perspective)
• Our backlog (or parking lot).  Anything that is over a certain amount of time, our reports show in red, indicating that those features are going past the time we want in the queue.

We have seen our trend of backlog items go down over the period of a month.  I see this as proof that this system works especially for our change management process.

Someone on the team mentioned the meetings were taking to long.  So we now mandate an actual standup meeting, no one sits down.  I think that's significant, because the team is beginning to buy in a little to this process.  I had heard this advice from other agilists, and now can attest that our meetings don't drag on because everyone is standing. 

One thing I want to push for is to limit the amount of change requests that can be in the backlog.  I'll let everyone know how that's going in another post.