Using the Kanban Method metrics to foster transparency about the success of blogs from finance solutions innovation units
Introduction
Working together between more than one department and/or team is combined often with high challenges in transparency and the ability to improve the lead time from and selected idea/option to when it is done with the appropriate level of quality and the corresponding tests. Books like “Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction” and “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development” describe in a comprehensive way that fosters the ability to make delays and bottlenecks visible enabling to improve of the corresponding workflow in a significant way which is one of the highest leverages.
This series of blog articles comprises four parts: (1) An overview of the overall case study and approach, (2) an article about making policies explicit, (3) an article about the applied Kanban metrics (this article), and (4) an article about the lessons learned in our blog service team.
How did I use these metrics?
The first blog article explained a two-day workshop where we fostered a common understanding of the usage of a Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) with a historical view starting from April, see figure 1. This was crucial to make it easily transparent that nothing was done/deployed and released in the first approximately 45 days.
The second figure visualizes the average net promoter score from April to the End of June 2021 and the timeframe from July to January 2022. Kanban fostered a real evolutionary change in our team which was comprised of members from different departments so that improvements were step by step visible and understandable. It was very satisfactory for everyone to see also the positive effects of making our work and flow visible as shown in figure 1.
We were able to deploy and release significantly more blog articles starting from the End of July — until January 2022 35 articles. This frequently new content (on average two to three times per week) resulted in a significant improvement in followers and (even more important) impressions of our content, see figure 3.
Also, the internal collaboration was reflected in our cadenced-based retrospectives. There we also improved our WIP limit from 7 items to 3 items in our Kanban system, see figure 4. Before, the inexperienced blog service team did not work with a WIP limit and did not manage its work appropriately till the end of June. After introducing the WIP limit from around the end of June / beginning of July: Effects of the introduction of a WIP limit:
- The average lead time fell from 39 to 20 due to the introduction of WIP limits, among other things, see figure 5
- Pull principle and the energy to work together inside the blog service team and the cross-functional collaboration was fostered
- There was an 85% probability that a work item was finished in 33 days instead of July 55 days
Conclusion and lookout
Using Kanban metrics to improve the blog team's ability to manage the flow was and is a comprehensive practice to foster collaboration and get things done. The metrics helped us to follow the principle: Stop starting, start finishing, and enabled us to make our progress transparent in our team, which comprised members from different departments and teams.
Read more about this case study in the other articles and do not hesitate to give me feedback and let your comments below: (1) An overview of the overall case study and approach, (2) an article about making policies explicit, (3) an article about the applied Kanban metrics (this article), and (4) an article about the lessons learned in our blog service team.
