What is Kanban Cycle Time? A Guide

"How long will this take?" It's a question that makes every project manager pause.

While no one can predict the future perfectly, understanding Cycle Time in Kanban can help teams provide more accurate and confident estimates. If you haven’t heard of Kanban, it is a popular framework used to implement Agile and DevOps software development.

Kanban brings clarity to software development by making work visible and measurable. Cycle time helps teams see how quickly they can deliver value to their customers while finding ways to do things faster without sacrificing quality. Using a visual board, teams track work as it moves through different stages, creating transparency around progress and bottlenecks. But the real power of Kanban lies in the data it generates about how work flows through your team.

Let's explore how tracking Cycle Time helps teams work more efficiently and provide better estimates.

In this article we define what is 'Kanban Cycle Time' and explore the differences with respect to other flow measures such as "Lead Time" and "Change Lead Time"

Sections:

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Kanban Cycle Time (or simply, "Cycle Time") reveals the actual “work-in-progress” time for a task, after development has started.  Think of it as one of your team's speedometers — lower Cycle Times indicate smooth, efficient delivery, while higher times often signal bottlenecks or process challenges that need attention.

By tracking and optimizing Cycle Time, teams can deliver value to customers faster and more predictably.

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Kanban focuses on continuous flow, measuring cycle time from when a task starts until it's completed. This makes it particularly effective during project execution phases, where maintaining steady workflow is crucial. Unlike time-boxed approaches, Kanban's visual tools help teams spot and address bottlenecks in real-time to improve workflow.

Cycle Time vs Lead Time

The main difference is that Lead Time includes time in backlog but Cycle Time does not.

Lead time is a key metric that measures the total time from when a work item is first ideated and documented to when it is delivered to the customer. It encompasses the entire process, including waiting periods, development, testing, and deployment. However, it's generally an unsuitable metric for truly agile teams due to variability in backlog time. Lead time might be more relevant in teams working on large projects with a waterfall structure and fewer customer feedback cycles.

Cycle Time vs Change Lead Time

Change Lead Time is one of the DORA Metrics by Google and measures one of the most predictable parts of the software development pipeline, which helps teams become higher performing. This is because Change Lead Time is most squarely in the control the engineering team, and relatively less affected by external stakeholders (though some coordination is inevitable). However, it is a marked improvement on using overall Lead Time.

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Measuring Cycle Time provides insights to help teams work together more effectively by:

• Improving workflow: If your Cycle Time is consistently longer than expected, it’s a signal that a particular phase of development is taking too long, possibly indicating a need for more resources or a change in processes.
• Setting realistic goals and improve planning: Historic Cycle Time data helps you create achievable objectives based on your team's actual performance. Instead of setting arbitrary deadlines, you can use past Cycle Times to help estimate how long similar tasks may take in the future.
• Fostering continuous improvement: Regularly keeping a pulse on Cycle Times encourages your team to fine-tune their processes. It creates a culture of constant improvement, where team members are always looking for ways to improve their work.

Ultimately, this leads to more value flowing through to the end customer, faster. However, these benefits can only be realized when the team trusts the metrics and the data accurately reflects their actual work patterns. This requires consistent tracking and a shared understanding and definition of how cycle time is measured across the team.

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While Cycle Time is also tracked with other methodologies (such as Scrum), there are some unique quirks to analyzing Cycle time with Kanban.

Kanban focuses on maintaining smooth, continuous flow of work. Teams measure Cycle Time from the moment a task starts until it's completed - an approach that works particularly well for ongoing processes where tasks come in with varying priorities and sizes. This is in contrast to Scrum, where Cycle Time is measured from when a task is picked up in a sprint to when it is done.

In Kanban, teams leverage visual tools like Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Scatterplots to spot where tasks might be getting stuck, making it easier to identify bottlenecks and adjust workflows accordingly. This visualization proves especially valuable during project execution phases, when teams need to maintain steady work flow.

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Calculating Cycle Time typically requires historical data from your issue-tracking tool, but the steps are relatively simple:

1. Identify the start and end points for your work items
2. Track the time it takes for each item to move from start to finish
3. Calculate Cycle Time using the formula:
4. Cycle Time = End Time (Date/Time when the work is ready for deployment) - Start Time(Date/Time when active work begins)

Precise cycle time calculations depend on teams clearly defining task start and end points. You also may have specific nuances to address for your context and team.

Common Challenges in Calculating Cycle Time

Measuring cycle time accurately can be challenging due to two common issues:

• Issue Tracking Problems: Poor tracking practices often hinder accurate cycle time calculations. Inconsistent status updates, incorrect labeling, or failure to move tasks through the proper workflow can lead to skewed measurements. Maintaining clean and accurate issue-tracking data is crucial for reliable results.
• Unclear Start and End Points: Teams may differ in how they define the beginning and completion of a task, leading to inconsistent measurements—even within the same organization. Establishing clear and agreed-upon definitions across the team is essential for consistency.

By recognizing and addressing these challenges, teams can enhance the accuracy of cycle time measurements and improve the reliability of other metrics they track.

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Identify and remove bottlenecks

Understanding where work slows down is your first step to improving Cycle Time. Tools like Multitudes provides valuable insights into how long tasks spend in each stage of your process. For example, you might discover:

• Code Reviews taking longer than expected
• Testing phases becoming a constraint
• Deployments creating unexpected delays

By analyzing these patterns in your workflow, teams can make targeted improvements where they'll have the most impact. The key is using data to drive decisions about where to focus your optimization efforts.

Streamlining workflows

The Flow Framework can help you improve your value streams to be more efficient. Here's how you can achieve this:

• Regularly examine your processes to identify and eliminate speed bumps. For example, streamline your change approval process to reduce delays. According to the DORA report, efficient change approval processes can significantly cut down Cycle Times. Look for opportunities to eliminate unnecessary steps and automate approvals where possible.
• Remove any unnecessary steps that aren't adding value. Focus on what truly matters and remove redundant procedures that slow down your team. You can do this by examining the outliers in your Cycle Time data and working with your team to identify root causes.
• Ensure that handoffs between team members are seamless and that there is clear communication throughout the transition of tasks between people.

Capturing learnings and monitoring trends

Tracking your team's Cycle Time trends over time is valuable to uncover valuable patterns in delivery speed. It’s important to not focus on too short of time periods, because then you can:

• Spot gradual changes that might otherwise go unnoticed
• Evaluate whether process improvements are working
• Identify seasonal patterns or recurring slowdowns
• Celebrate wins when the team makes sustainable improvements

This long-term view helps teams make better decisions about process changes and builds confidence in continuous improvement efforts.

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Multitudes offers tools that can help you track and enhance your team's delivery performance. By integrating with your existing development tools, such as GitHub, Jira and more, Multitudes provides insights into your workflow, specifically focusing on Cycle Time.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Track Change Lead Time automatically to understand how long work takes from initiation to completion
• Get visibility into work patterns and the balance between feature development, bug fixes, and other tasks to identify where time is spent
• Spot collaboration patterns and potential silos that might impact your team's cycle time
• Monitor team wellbeing through metrics like out-of-hours work and responsiveness, helping maintain sustainable productivity

By utilizing these insights, teams can focus on meaningful improvements to their cycle time, leading to more efficient delivery and increased team satisfaction.

Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams?

Try Multitudes today!