Cycle time calculations boost adaptability

[Ehsanuls55]

Being agile means responding to change and customer demand. Cycle time is a direct indicator of your responsiveness. With industry benchmarking, you can reasonably measure your company's competitive advantage by cycle time.

Cycle length reflects continuous improvement efforts
Cycle time monitoring fosters a culture of continuous improvement within the development team, helping them systematically identify inefficiencies and areas for improvement.

For example, a team may discover that code review is a bottleneck and adopt pair programming to solve it, thereby improving their overall process and reducing cycle time.

Shorter cycles = satisfied customers
All customers are happy when they can get results faster, so shorter cycle times directly improve customer satisfaction.

Imagine a software team reducing the cycle time for new feature requests from one month to two weeks. Customers benefit from faster updates, which can directly impact the bottom line.

All of the above = happy teams
Cycle time is a critical indicator of individual and team performance. An efficient cycle media directors email list time makes team members feel fulfilled and valued. Meeting customer demand boosts team morale.

Continuous improvement accelerates their personal learning curves, making them feel proud of their work. Overall, trends in cycle times can often be a measure of a team's progress.

Now that you know these benefits, how can you take advantage of them? Let's take a look.

How to calculate cycle length?
Cycle time is simply the time it takes to complete a task from the time you started it. So the formula for cycle time is pretty straightforward.

Cycle time formula for individual work items
Cycle length = End time - Start time

The above formula is best applied to individual work items. From kneading bread dough to coding a single function. If you started at 12:30 and finished at 230, the cycle time for that task is two hours.

Cycle time formula for batches
However, in most cases, the cycle time for one part of the process—such as kneading dough or coding—on its own may not be the most valuable. A project manager is better off knowing the cycle time from development to deployment.

This set of tasks is called a batch and is measured as batch cycle time.

Batch cycle time = Net cycle time/Number of units produced

In this case, the net cycle time is the sum of the cycle times of all tasks in the batch. It is usually measured in hours, days, or weeks, depending on the scope and scale of the projects. In manufacturing, it is also called net production time.

The number of units produced is the count of all work items (e.g. features, bug fixes, user stories) that were completed in that time frame.

If this seems straightforward, think again. Cycle time, especially batch cycle time, is a set of multiple moving parts, each with its own complexities. One small misstep can throw calculations off and pose a number of problems.