Table of Contents:
1. Overview of the time metrics in Kanbanize
2. What is Cycle Time and how to configure it?
3. What is Lead Time?
4. What is Logged Time
5. What is Blocked time?
1. Overview of the time metrics in Kanbanize
There are various metrics that teams use to measure the performance and efficiency of their process.
The time metrics, which are at the core of this article, provide valuable insights into your teams' operations and performance. Kanbanize collects historical data for your workflow automatically.
These are the time metrics that you can collect and analyze in the system:
- Cycle time and Lead time metrics help teams estimate how long it takes for work items to be completed.
- Lead time is the period between a new task’s appearance in your workflow and its final departure from the system.
- Cycle time begins at the moment when the new arrival enters “in progress” stage and somebody is actually working on it. - Logged time indicates the pure time spend on a certain task. Users log time manually against each task or a subtask.
- Blocked time shows how long a card has been blocked, respectively how much time it takes for a blocker to get resolved.
2. What is Cycle Time and how to configure it?
Cycle time begins at the moment when the new task enters the “In progress” stage (and somebody is actually working on it) until it's ready for delivery.
Kanbanize automatically tracks the times that a card has spent in each column along the process, then it adds those values together to form the Cycle time of a card.
Shorter cycle time means an optimized process and faster delivery time. Longer cycle time means delays for customers and might indicate for process inefficiency.
The Cycle time is configured per board. You can choose which columns from your workflow to be included for the calculation of the card "cycle time".
For example, it is often appropriate to exclude the Backlog, Done and Archive columns from the cycle time calculation, as cards are not being worked on when they are in one of these stages.
This configuration depends on your context.
How is Cycle time configured?
To configure your Cycle time, open the board edit mode via the “Edit Workflow” icon.
Both the INITIATIVES WORKFLOW and the CARDS/TEAMS WORKFLOW may have separate cycle time configuration (img.1).
Note: In case that your Board consists of multiple Team Workflows, each workflow may have a separate cycle time setup too.
Img.1
Click the CONFIGURE CYCLE TIME link to the right side of each workflow to open the configuration panel.
This panel visualizes all columns in the respective board. Checkmark the columns that you want to be accounted for.
Note: At least one column needs to be selected when configuring the cycle time metric, otherwise time will be accrued for all columns.
Where is Cycle time visible?
Kanbanize automatically collects the cycle time of every card that passes through your Kanban board.
Тhe accumulated cycle time for a card gets displayed on the bottom right corner of each card in your workflow. The number that you see will always be measured in days.
Note: To make cycle time visible on cards, make sure that you have checkmarked "Show Cycle Time" in the Card settings of the respective board.
How does Kanbanize track the cycle time of deleted columns?
Very often the workflow changes as columns are added or deleted and this impacts the cycle time of the cards that go through affected stages.
To avoid losing the cycle time data associated with the column you delete, select where you want to move it to. Choosing any of the available columns, for example, "In progress" might lead to further confusion, because the cycle time data from the two columns will be summed up.
However, if you select "Discard the data", the card cycle time for the deleted column will be stored in a separate section under the Metrics tab of the card.
The new section named "Deleted columns" stores and displays the cycle time of the cards that have been in the column, which no longer exists on the board.
How is the Cycle time metric measured and tracked?
Using the Kanbanize Analytics modules, Project Managers and their teams can analyze the cards Cycle time and figure out why things are taking longer than expected. Cycle time is a good indicator of any process deviations.
Here is the list of charts that provide insight into the Cycle time metric:
- The Cumulative Workflow chart
- The Cycle Time Scatterplot
- The Cycle time Histogram
- The Aging Work in progress
- The Heat Map chart
Important: For more information, please check the dedicated articles on our resource page.
3. What is Lead Time?
Lead time is the total amount of time from confirmed customer order until delivery.
Kanbanize automatically records the time each card has spent between process initiation and completion. You can check the Lead time per card using the Metrics tab of the respective card.
Open the tab and click the arrows to expand the generic Kanban stages view (Backlog, Requested, In Progress, Done) in order to see how much time was spent in every column.
Cycle time and Lead Time are important factors for customer satisfaction as well as a good indicator of team performance. Teams measure those metrics using the analytics modules embedded in Kanbanize.
Important:
To learn more about Lead time and Cycle time, please check the following article.
To learn how to measure Cycle time and Lead time, please check the dedicated article.
4. What is Logged Time
Log time shows how much pure time has been spent on a given task. Users log time manually.
Logging working hours on a Kanban card is easy and every user can do it on a card or subtask level.
There are several ways to log time against a task.
The logged time is stored in the Metrics tab of the corresponding card.
The Timesheet report tool in Kanbanize generates reports and displays a summary of logged hours for a user or a group of users for a given period of time. Only Account Owners or Workspace Managers can generate "Logged time" reports. To learn more about the Timesheet report, please check the dedicated article.
All regular users can check how much time was logged on every task via the My Queue and Worklog feature (check p. 5). They can choose to see how much time has been accumulated for: today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, last month.
5. What is Blocked time?
The block time shows how long a card has been blocked, respectively how much time it takes for a blocker to get resolved. There are several ways to block a card and thus indicate a problem/blocker.
All blocked cards accumulate block time. The block time per card is stored in the respective Metric tab.
"Blocked time" in Analytics:
You can measure the blocked time metric using the embedded analytics modules.
The Block Resolution time provides a convenient overview of all blocked cards and shows how many times a task has been blocked, for how long and what the reason for the blocker was.
The blocked time metric helps you identify which blocker types are most critical. For more information, please check the dedicated article.