How Agile teams can use Cycle Time to enhance predictability, flow, and customer value
What is Cycle Time?
Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes for a piece of work to move from the time the team starts working on it to the time it is completed. It’s purely active working time, which the team took to finish something. It helps teams understand speed, flow efficiency, and predictability.
Example: A team member started working on something, and the Jira Workflow is defined as: To Do → In Progress → Code Review → Done
Now the team started working on the Story on 10 Aug and moved it to done on 17 Aug. Then Cycle Time = 17 Aug – 10 Aug = 7 days
Another example is to calculate the Cycle Time for a Support Ticket. If a support ticket is picked up at 2:00 PM and resolved by 6:30 PM.
Then Cycle Time = 4.5 hours
Cycle Time and Lead Time
The Lead Time and Cycle Time are important metrics in Kanban. These metrics help to gauge work progress and the timely resolution of bottlenecks and make the overall system lean.
As we know, Cycle Time is the duration between when a work item enters an “in-progress” state and when it reaches “done”.
Lead Time is slightly different than this. Lead Time measures the total time from the customer request to final delivery, i.e., from when the item is requested or added to the backlog until the item is delivered.
So, the Lead Time = Request → Delivery and Cycle Time = Work Start → Work Finish
Example: Suppose a customer requests a feature on 1 Aug, but the team actually starts working on it on 5 Aug and finishes on 10 Aug. So, the Lead Time and Cycle Time will be calculated as:
- Lead Time = 1 Aug → 10 Aug = 9 days
- Cycle Time = 5 Aug → 10 Aug = 5 days
Importance of Cycle Time
- It helps to improve predictability by making the team understand how long some work will usually take. This allows teams to make more predictable delivery commitments.
- Cycle Time helps in Identifying Bottlenecks that are hindering smooth delivery by the team. If it is longer, then it indicates issues like delay in overall delivery, handoff issues or dependencies, overburdened team members, underestimating the complexity of work, etc. Shorter Cycle Time shows how smoothly work is flowing through the system.
- By using historical Cycle Time, teams can do efficient planning. It allows teams to set realistic commitments, have a more efficient plan, and a roadmap in place.
- Reviewing and assessing Cycle Time regularly fosters the habit of continuous improvement for teams. Cycle Time trends can be discussed in retrospectives to reduce waste, improve processes, simplify workflows, and optimize WIP limits.
- Shorter and stable Cycle Time helps in enhancing Customer Satisfaction. It enables faster delivery, more responsiveness to customer needs, and quicker feedback loops.
How to reduce Cycle Time?
- Improving workflow – Review and assess overall workflow. See where teams are spending more time, and how that can be reduced.
- Limiting Work in Progress (WIP) – Encourage focusing on one item at a time, and not doing multi-tasking. This will help in reducing context switching and allow the team to keep WIP limited.
- Better refinement – The Product Owner should conduct more focused and effective backlog refinement sessions, ensuring the team has complete clarity on what needs to be delivered. All necessary information should be available upfront, and any open questions should be resolved promptly to enable smooth and predictable delivery.
- Removing bottlenecks – The Scrum Master should work closely with the team to identify and eliminate any bottlenecks that hinder delivery. They must proactively collaborate with other teams and stakeholders to resolve issues quickly and ensure uninterrupted flow of work.
The team should review Cycle Time frequently. Few opportunities to review it are retrospectives, Daily Scrum, and Weekly Flow. Scrum Master/Leads can use charts and dashboards (Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello, Linear) to effectively review it and take required actions.
In summary, Cycle Time measures how long it takes for a work item to move from the moment the team starts working on it to the moment it is completed. It reflects only the active working time, helping teams understand their execution speed, workflow efficiency, and delivery predictability. Tracking it is important because it helps teams predict delivery timelines, identify bottlenecks, plan more accurately, and continuously improve their flow. Shorter, stable Cycle Times also lead to faster feedback loops and increased customer satisfaction.