I’ve noticed that there is a lot of confusion in our industry on the subject of Cycle Time and Lead Time, so I made a visual diagram that should help clarify things a bit.
Both of these times are lagging indicator metrics that measure how long it takes for a feature to go from one part of a value stream to the other. Here’s the basic break down of the two:
Lead Time: The time from when a customer asks for a feature to the time a customer receives that feature in production.
Cycle Time: The time from when the development team/makers start work to when they finish that work.
The Visual:
Note: You may have non-development activities that occur after development is complete, and this is part of lead time but not cycle time. An example of this: Organizational Change Management activities that are happening after development.
Why is this important?
A perfect scrum team doing 2-week iterations will start work and then finish it in 2 weeks’ time. So, a perfect scrum team’s Cycle time is two weeks. But… when did the customer ask for that feature? When did they actually get it? Did we release the feature the same day we finished it? Or did it wait for a release, or the end of the Product Increment (PI in SAFe land)?
The lead time might be a lot longer than two weeks. And it doesn’t matter how fast your cycle time is if the lead time is still too slow. That’s why knowing and tracking both numbers is critical to help inform your team’s continuous improvement efforts.
Post in the comments below – do you know what your lead time is from your customer’s perspective?