What is throughput in Kanban and how do you measure it?
4 min readApr 3, 2023
What is throughput?
The number of items that the Kanban system members deliver to the end of the workflow, to the finish point of the workflow every time period.
Example: If your time period is in a day, you’d have a throughput per day. If it’s a week, throughput per week, throughput per spring, throughput per month, per quarter, per semester, and so on.
What is throughput based on?
Throughput is based on the number of work items and work items are valuable.
They value in terms of either:
- customer value;
- end user value;
- market value;
- organizational value;
- the reduction of risk value;
- societal value; AND
- learning.
