Cycle and Lead Time Include Holidays?
Hi everyone,
Do you think the cycle and lead time periods should include holidays (weekends, public holidays, etc.)? In my opinion, production time should not include holidays as it only includes business days. What should it be?
Thanks.
Best regards,
Problems are rarely solved by reducing transparency. What would you hope to achieve by doing so in this case?
Problems are rarely solved by reducing transparency. What would you hope to achieve by doing so in this case?
I aim to measure performance with precise and realistic values for the team. I hope to speak to the right values when reporting to senior management.
I hope to speak to the right values when reporting to senior management.
I'd suggest that 7 days to complete something is still 7 days, regardless of what management thinks.
What decisions are management making which would encourage a team to pretend otherwise?
With regards to lead time, do your customers and/or stakeholders think in terms of calendar days or business days?
I would suggest cycle time stay within the team, and I don't think it matters if you include or exclude weekends as long as you are consistent over time.
Lead time and cycle time are both elapsed time measures.
To use an analogy, when you order a pizza and they tell you it will take 1 hour, you expect it in 1 hour.
What if the pizza place really meant it will take 1 hour of effort, but it might actually take 3 hours due to them having breaks etc. You as the customer are likely to have issues with this. Why would this be any different for your stakeholders and customers?
When you say you're aiming at accurately measuring the team's performance by using Cycle Time data, does that mean that if that Scrum Team delivers lots of small items with pretty short Cycle Times, but with absolutely no customer value, that team is still considered a high performing team?
I would beware of the trap of using flow metrics as a performance measure instead of using it as a way of providing your stakeholders with accurate and reliable delivery expectations.
My opinion is that Cycle and Lead time should include all calendar days. That helps to make things consistent across year boundaries.
And I'm going to join in on the "it's a bad idea" to use these for performance metrics. In an agile world, the value that is delivered and how consistently that is done is the performance you want to track. For all the reasons that have been mentioned so far.
Cycle and Lead time can be used by the team to understand their ability to complete items so that forecasting value delivery can become more predictable.