Updated: January 11, 2023
By Kerry Seaton – former Agile Success Manager at Plandek

How should you be optimising your Kanban workflow?

There are lots of different styles and techniques that meet the definition of ‘working Agile’. Some Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, are more common than others. For both Scrum and Kanban, tracking your workflow is essential: that’s why Plandek offers Scrum and Kanban metrics that are tailor-made and tested for these team dynamics.

Scrum reporting tends to focus on metrics such as Sprint Completion, Tickets Added/Removed, and Sprint Burndowns. For Kanban, however, a team would probably be more interested in metrics like Story Flow, Task Flow, Cycle Time and Flow Efficiency.

Using the Plandek platform, Kanban teams can quickly drill down into these metrics and prioritise them based on the use case and relevance.

Kanban Metric 1: Story Flow by Epic

Story Flow by Epic | Plandek dashboard

Set your filter to an epic name to see how the associated Stories or tasks are moving through your workflow. As a Kanban metric, this provides important end-to-end visibility over your SDLC, meaning you can optimise the current Sprint as well as those in the future.

Kanban metric 2: Flow Efficiency

Flow Efficiency | Plandek dashboard

With this metric, set your active statuses from your Kanban workflow and review the efficiency by seeing how long your Stories are in an active state versus an inactive state. With Plandek, you can customise the parameters between which a story is defined as ‘active’ as well as ‘inactive’. This is essential for Kanban optimisation, as well as your team’s continuous growth.

Kanban metric 3: Story Backlog and New vs Completed Stories

Story Backlog / New Story / Completed Stories | Plandek dashboard

Using Plandek’s Overlay feature, you can view your story backlog and follow the overall trend of new versus completed Stories. Remember you can configure the metrics to whatever suits your team’s ways of working, using perhaps tasks instead of Stories or you might want to look at this per epic, simply by filtering on the epic name.

About Plandek

Plandek is an intelligent analytics platform that helps software engineering teams deliver value faster and more predictably.

Celebrated by Gartner and Forrester as a ‘leading global vendor’, Plandek mines data from delivery teams’ toolsets and gives them the opportunity to optimise their delivery process using both intelligent insights and predictive analytics. 

Co-founded in 2017 by Dan Lee (founder of Globrix) and Charlie Ponsonby (founder of Simplifydigital), Plandek is based in London and currently services the UK, Europe, the Middle East and North America.

Find out more about Plandek here: The Plandek Difference.