Lead and Cycle Time
- Natallia_Mendzel@epam.com
- Maksim Chorny
- Katsiaryna_Subach
Purpose
Lead time clock starts when a a feature is "ordered" (i.e. a ticket is created) and ends at delivery of a result (i.e. feature released to production). Cycle time clock starts when the work begins (e.g. implementation) - and ends in the same way as Lead time does. Cycle time is a more mechanical measure of process capability. Lead time is what the customer sees.
Lead time depends on cycle time, but also depends on your willingness to keep a backlog, the customer’s patience, and the customer’s readiness for delivery.
How metric helps
Lead and Cycle Time are most useful if a project has restrictions for fulfilling requests within a certain time.
Cycle Time values should be as close as possible to Lead Time values to ensure time spent in a most effective way with no waste on delays throughout the value chain. Lead Time might be a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to confirm a development cycle duration.
Questions it answers:
whether there are any process issues to trigger a deep investigation
whether changes in the process and/or team are needed
whether planning is mature enough
when we can complete backlog items having information on the team's lead time.
how a team handles requests
how long does it take to complete a request (probability)
how much work the team can take on/commit to
how fast a team is identifying/removing roadblocks
how stable the flow is and where you need to improve
How metric works
Chart overview
Trend view
Lead and Cycle Time is measured in hours. A chart shows an average value for lead and cycle time by:
Week
Month
Quarter
So that the axis X shows calendar week dates; month names; and quarter order numbers correspondingly. By click on series a drill down opens which shows lead an cycle time for every issue included in the chart.
Average view
Lead and Cycle Time is measured in days. A chart shows the following statistics for lead and cycle time:
average value
maximum value
minimum value
median
average flow efficiency - ratio between average lead time and cycle time (the closer it to 100% the better)
The values can be seen for the following time intervals:
Last 7 days
Last 30 days
Last 90 days
Custom time interval
The statistics is available by issue types used in a project.
TOP-5 problems metric identifies
Calculation
Average Lead Time
For a single issue:
Lead time = T done - T created, where
T done - moment in time the ticket is put into a status belonging to "Done" bucket.
T created - moment in time when the ticket is created.
For all issues:
Average Lead Time = Σ Lead Time / N, where
Lead Time - time for a single issue at the date;
N - number of issues transferred to Done bucket at the date.
Average Cycle Time
For a single issue:
Cycle time = T done - T progress, where
T done - moment in time the ticket is put into a status belonging to "Done" bucket.
T progress - moment in time the ticket is put in a status belonging to "In progress" bucket.
For all issues:
Average Cycle Time = Σ Cycle Time/N, where
Cycle Time - time for a single issue at the date;
N - number of issues transferred to Done bucket at the date.
Maximum, minimum and median values are calculated according to common mathematical formulas.
The metric summarizes all periods when an item is in progress. If any item was re-opened (no matter how many times) - the all occurrences of a respective status is taken into the consideration.
It is useful to know how Lead/Cycle Time is connected with other time usage metrics:
PerfQL
Data Source
Data for the metric can be collected from a task tracking system (Jira, TFS/VSTS, Rally, etc.)