Ah yes, cycle time.
One of the most insightful agile metrics, yet often overlooked or misunderstood. While many teams focus on burndown charts or velocity, cycle time provides a direct measurement of efficiency. It tells you how long work actually takes from start to finish. Understanding and optimizing cycle time can help teams deliver faster and identify bottlenecks before they become major issues.
Let’s uncover cycle time as an agile metric together.
What is cycle time?
Before defining cycle time, I want to introduce a relatable scenario that will help you grasp the concept far better than any definition. The scenario is the well-known work of packing boxes before moving into a new home. Also, don't worry, the definition of cycle time is right after this example.
Now, you don't know how many boxes you're going to pack, only that you need to pack everything down in your home. You are also aware that the moving company will pick up your packed boxes in 3 weeks. So, naturally you decide to begin tomorrow, and that you will start with your living room.
Let's say that you start 9 in the morning the next day, and have the first box packed by 10.30 before noon. Your cycle time is then 1 hour and 30 minutes for that one packed box. That is your total duration from start (empty box) to finish (packed box), ready to be moved to your new home.
The next box takes you 3 hours to pack, mainly because you started streaming a new tv-series and took a longer than usual lunch. Remember, the time is counting from the second you start till you finish. The third box you complete in 30 minutes.
You have now packed three boxes:
- Box 1 = 1 hour and 30 minutes
- Box 2 = 3 hours
- Box 3 = 30 minutes
Over the course of 3 weeks, you track all the other boxes' cycle time, realizing that some are moved quickly, while others take much longer. When visualizing this data on a chart, you would see your efficiency of packing boxes. Over time, analyzing this data would help you spot differences in your efficiency of packing boxes. Maybe some boxes took too long because they were heavier, or you procrastinated a bit, or the items were easy to pack, or maybe certain delays were caused by external factors.
Understanding the cycle times would be key for improvements in your workflow. You would want to achieve a consistent cycle time for each box, while having a highly variable cycle time would signal bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or blockers.
So, cycle time is not about how much work is left or completed. On the contrary, it is about how long each task to complete a cycle from start to finish, which is why it is called cycle time.
Now, back to my promise of giving you a simple definition of cycle time.
Simple definition of cycle time
Cycle time is the time it takes for a task to move from start to finish. Visualizing multiple cycle times on a chart will help identify potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies in workflows.
