Today, I’m going to make the case for "cycle time" being one of the most powerful measures to study in your workplace.
Cycle time is simply the measure of time (usually days) between two events, or stages, or activities.
Cycle Time Examples
As way of example, here are some things I tend to study in the workplace:
- The time between a team starting a piece of work and the value of that work being "released" to customers.
- The time between a customer case coming in to the team, and the query or problem being solved to the customer's satisfaction.
- The time between coming up with a commercial idea and it being started.
Within each of these there are countless stages that could be measured too. For example, you could measure the cycle time between work being started and it being finished (without being released to customers). You could then measure the time from "completed work" to "released to customer" - it's not uncommon to find completed work taking months to be released.
The idea is to measure how long things take to move from one state or place, to another.
It’s a measure I always use.
I consider cycle time the health of the system of work.
But what is a good cycle time?
There is no right or wrong cycle time - it is what it is (for now).
Things take as long as they do - and cycle time is a neutral measure from one point to another.
However, you can use cycle time to optimise a process or system - or see whether experiments and improvements are helping you to become smoother and faster, or not.
It's also important to study any variances in cycle time.
Let's say you have a process for releasing new Social Media campaigns. There's an idea generation stage, then a design stage, then an approval process, a content creation stage, then a publish stage and then a measure stage. Pretty simple.
Let's say you have 5 people in the team looking after social media - and they are all working in this process. There are multiple channels and various teams involved in the input, review and measure (marketing, PR, HR, Legal, Leadership etc).
When you measure cycle time you can see how smoothly and quickly you can go from idea to value - and that's all we're ever trying to do at work by the way.
Let's say your average cycle time is 3 days. Pretty good. But there are some outliers. Sometimes it takes 9 days and other times it's just a day.
The variation can give you clues as to where to study and optimise.
Maybe, the 9 day cycle time is just for one social channel. Why does it take longer to run a social media activity for that channel? Is it the people involved? Are the reviews taking longer? Is that channel more complicated?
There may be no problem to solve - but you have data to suggest delivering value is inconsistent within this process.
Maybe your main competitors in the market are pushing out new campaigns or content everyday and you're not - it's taking about 3 days. Well, what could you do to get to a cycle time of 1 day?
Does it make sense to aim for 1 day? What would you need to do? Where does the work slow down? Does everyone on the team have the ability to achieve this goal?
There are no hard and fast rules, nor perfect cycle times.
It's a neutral measure that merely shows how long it takes for work to move through a process.
Cycle time will vary per team, per function, per work process, per business and so on. It therefore makes no sense to compare teams using this measure. It is a measure that belongs to the people who own the process - and it's just that - a measure. The measure alone won't tell you what to do or how to do it.
A "target" cycle time may also cause dysfunction as people cut corners, tell white lies or ship lower quality work to meet the cycle time. A "target" cycle time may also create an artificial ceiling that people work to achieve, then stop making any further improvements.
Ideally you're after a stable cycle time with only a little fluctuation - after all, all work is variable unless you're building widgets on a production line.
A stable cycle time would suggest that your system is healthy - and variety of work is catered for within your process.
Over time a cycle time may get shorter if you're making improvements, but there will come a time when it's no longer worth investing time, money, energy and attention in improvements in this process, versus focussing on another process which could do with some love.
Work may just take as long as it takes - and therefore there is little value in trying to make the cycle time number shorter.
There is no right or wrong - it is what it is - but it likely could be improved.
Use it for anything - as long as you care about what it shows
Cycle time can be used anywhere and for anything.
I applied the concept of cycle time when recruiting. I measured the time it took from first contact by the candidate to an offer or rejection. We spotted plenty of areas to remove delays, waste, and gaps. I wrote about it in my book Join Our Company.
And that’s a key point - it gives you a clue where to look. Cycle time alone will not solve your problems, but it can highlight where your delays, gaps and slowdowns are. To improve something though, you need to care.
It doesn’t matter what the cycle time is when you first measure it. You may want it to be a better number than it is - but it is what it is.
The goal is to study what the cycle time is telling you and decide what to do.
What can you do to make it shorter, or flow smoother? Or is it ok? Or are you not bothered about improving this part of the business?
As I mentioned, we measured the cycle time from first contact with a potential candidate (application, or direct contact), to when we accepted or rejected that candidate. The initial number, on first measure, was a cycle time of over a 50 days.
Through lots of hard work, we got the cycle time down to an average of 10 days. No matter what we did it was hard to get the average cycle time down to less than this.
However, without measuring cycle time, we would have no solid insights or evidence as to what parts of the process where failing, nor whether it was even a consistent experience for candidates. After all, it took some candidates a few weeks to move through our process, and others a few months - we kind of knew this was happening, but we had no evidence.
The process was unstable. After we'd finished our improvements, it was stable. It was a healthy system.
Cycle time is one of my 5 key measures of business agility:
- Business Results - the ultimate measure of business agility (typically a financial goal or target)
- Cycle Time - how long things take to move through the processes
- Throughput - how much work is done
- Failure Demand - how much work are we doing because we didn’t get it right, or do it at all
- Work in Process - how much work are we taking on right now
Cycle time can be applied to anything with the goal of shortening the duration from beginning to end.
Sadly, I even apply this in my own life.
I measure how long it takes to make a video from starting the shoot, to uploading to YouTube. I measure how long it takes to create my newsletters. I measure how long it takes to write a book. All with the aim of looking for opportunities to optimise the process.
So, if you’re looking for ways to make your business better - staple yourself to work (metaphorically not physically) and measure the journey the work goes on.
Map it out, add how long work takes to move through the process (cycle time), make it visible, then gather talented people to make it better.
Cycle time a powerful measure for sure, but be careful that you don’t try to rush good work. It can be tempting to optimise too far - but work sometimes takes as long as it takes.
