Purpose

Throughput shows a quantity of tasks a team delivers over time.  

How metric helps

First of all, this metric shows how productive a team is, how much they deliver [e.g. per week or month] in general. This gives an understanding of overall delivery capability of a team. 

Additionally, throughput can help prevent team overload by comparing a work put into a pipeline vs. finite team velocity - it's always better to know upfront about a risk of delays, risk of a team burnout.

Questions it answers:

• what is team's capacity 

• how a team handles requests

• how many tasks a team can complete within a certain time period

• how much work the team can take on/commit to

• how fast a team is identifying/removing roadblocks

• whether planning is mature enough

• when we can complete backlog items having information on the team's lead time

How metric works

Chart overview

Series of "Created" and "Resolved" work on the chart are represented in natural amount of work items (e.g. support tickets or regular tasks), i.e. no any effort or sizing is taken into consideration here. A chart shows a number of created tasks in comparison to a number of resolved tasks by:

• Week

• Month

• Quarter
  

So that the axis X shows calendar week dates; month names; and quarter order numbers correspondingly. By click on any column - a drill down will show appropriate list of created or resolved items respectively. 

TOP-5 problems metric identifies 

1. Not ready for development backlog is taken into work

2. Unexpected blockers or dependencies

3. Uncontrolled scope volatility 

4. Low productivity due to reduced agility 

5. Too many dependent teams

Calculation 

Created items value: a number of items which were created within a selected period.

Resolved items value: a number of items moved to "Done" bucket (per Workflows in Project Configuration) over the same time range.

RAG thresholds: n/a.

Data Source

Data for the metric can be collected from a task tracking system (Jira, TFS/VSTS, Rally, etc.)