Gain Valuable Insight from your Lead Time Histogram 13 Aug 2014

Users that select Scrumban capabilities for their projects enable a range of new capabilities and features. Among these is the ability to define and calculate a variety of new metrics. Today we’ll chat a little bit about the significance of Lead Time.

First, there are different types of Lead Times a team or organization may wish to measure. ScrumDo users have the ability to define their systems and how they want to measure Lead Times based on their own needs.

Typically, system lead time is measured as the duration of time between when a customer request is made and the date it is actually delivered. In a Scrum context, you may choose to establish these as the date a user story is added to your Release or Iteration Backlog and the date a user story is deployed to production. There are a variety of factors that should be considered in defining and reporting on key metrics, and a good consultant / coach can walk you through these.

Visualizing your Lead Time distributions are extremely useful. They provide data on your median and average times (the values of which are typically quite different), they can expose patterns about the nature of work undertaken and help identify better ways of managing it.

Lead Time Histogram has many filtering options

Don’t confuse lead time with the amount of effort required to complete a user story! For example, a user story can have a lead time of 1 week but actual working time might only have been one day. Lead time distributions reflect system performance, and can be used to establish service level expectations, improve predictability, and when combined with insights gleaned from other system measurements, help us precisely target and prioritize improvement efforts.