Cycle Time measures the time from the moment an item is actively worked on until its completion. It captures the actual processing time and is therefore a subset of Lead Time, which additionally includes wait time before work begins. For process optimization, Cycle Time is one of the most informative metrics because it shows how efficiently the team operates within its active work phases.
A concrete example: a ticket is moved to “In Progress” on Tuesday at 9 AM and marked as “Done” the same day at 3 PM. The Cycle Time is six hours. If the Lead Time for the same ticket is three days because it waited two days in the backlog beforehand, the discrepancy becomes visible: the majority of the throughput time consists of waiting, not working. This insight is the starting point for targeted improvement, such as through WIP Limits or more frequent pulling of items.
Cycle Time originally comes from manufacturing and was adapted for Kanban and DevOps. It is best displayed as an average or distribution over a time period to identify outliers and trends.
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