February 20, 2017
Kanban Teams

Cycle Time goes Visual

Cycle time (or System Lead Time as some call it) is one of the most common metrics used to measure the effectiveness of a Kanban system. Cycle time is the time taken by a Kanban card to move from start to end on the board (or some part thereof). As you start using a Kanban system and implementing its principles, ideally the cycle time of the system should reduce. In David Anderson’s initial blogs “http://www.djaa.com/why-kanban-why-focus-lead-time-reduction” he has clearly emphasized the importance of reducing the lead or cycle time of a Kanban system. Besides the obvious advantage of “faster-time-to-market” or faster delivery of value to customer, lead time reduction usually mean reduction of wait times in the overall workflow as the Kanban system helps to highlight and reduce different types of waste, including time between handoffs, blocked time due to waiting on external (or internal) dependencies, etc.
January 22, 2013
Why Swiftkanban

Benefits of Kanban: 300% Cycle Time Reduction!

Over the last few years of steady-state usage of Kanban in our product management and engineering teams, we have achieved a number of dramatic improvements. Even considering that for us, it was – and is – a case of eating our own dog-food, these improvements are nothing short of incredible for a small product company where every minute, every dollar, every feature that is value to a customer, counts! So, we thought we should share our experience and benefits with the software and IT community in the hope that some of these will help you benefit as much or more than what we have been able to do. This post is the first in this series.
August 21, 2012
Product Updates

Visualizing Cycles in Kanban

At a training session in Kitchener Waterloo, Canada. I was asked how to visualize and handle cycles in a Kanban board. The images below show a way to do it as a physical board and on an electronic board such as Swift Kanban. Tickets within a cycle move from left to right, from one column to the next until and cycle back as many times as necessary and once done they move to the Done column at the the end of the cycle. Note that columns inside the cycle can contain their own Done columns.