Lesson 8: Kanban & Success Metrics

Kanban is a Lean and Agile methodology that originated at Toyota's plants in the 1950s, built on visualizing the workflow, limiting work-in-process, and managing flow. In this lesson we meet the Kanban board, the Pull model, the WIP (Work In Process) limit, and the idea of JIT (Just-In-Time); we com

In brief: Kanban is a board that shows every task in columns 'to do / in progress / done', limits how many tasks are open at once (WIP), and pulls a new task only when one is finished — and to know if the team is succeeding we measure throughput and cycle time.

Kanban: A Lean and Agile methodology from Toyota (1950s) for visualizing the workflow, limiting work-in-process, and managing flow; the word means 'signboard / visual card' in Japanese (KAN=sign, BAN=board).
Kanban board: A visual board where a card represents one task, and each column represents a state the task can be in; the leftmost column = initial state, the rightmost = final state, and cards are pulled rightward as the task progresses.
WIP limit (Work In Process): Limiting the number of tasks simultaneously in process, to improve flow and avoid overloading the team — finishing work before starting new work.
JIT (Just-In-Time): Producing only what is needed, exactly when and where it is needed; Kanban is a visual control system to achieve JIT — it cuts lead time, frees space, and improves quality.
Throughput: The number of stories (tasks) delivered in a given period; a central Kanban metric measuring the team's actual delivery.
Cycle Time: The number of days to deliver a story after work on it started; a key responsiveness metric in Kanban, usually reported with an 85% confidence interval.
Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD): A powerful visualization showing exactly where a bottleneck forms: horizontal axis = time, vertical axis = cumulative number of tasks, and colored bands = the board's columns; a widening band signals a bottleneck.
Story Points: A unit of measure for the complexity of a task/user story; the team estimates relative effort (complexity, risk, uncertainty) from shared experience, usually in Fibonacci-sequence values (1,2,3,5,8,13...).
Jira: A suite of agile work-management tools; a Jira project = the collection of all issues to achieve a goal, and a board = the tool to manage those issues in columns along the workflow.