Modern project management best practices have evolved in large part thanks to concepts borrowed from quality management, analysis by systems such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen. Today's aim is to demonstrate some of these techniques, and how your project, or process, can benefit from them.
1- Lead Time
This is one of the best known and used by IT managers, but other areas would also benefit greatly if they could implement it. Lead time, for six sigma, is nothing more than the time that a demand takes from the order to the delivery of the item, from the receipt of the order to the delivery to the consumer. Its application goes far beyond the productive processes, understanding the lead time of your team can help you to know, for example, how long you can deliver a project of similar complexity, or an item in the backlog, or even the total time to resolve a call, the latter of which we use a lot in Service Management consulting.
2- Cycle Time
If the lead time is the time that the task takes within your production, the cycle time is the time you spend effectively producing such activity. Understanding cycle time is very important because it helps you understand your production capacity. An example I like to use is: if a team member works 30 hours a week, and solves 15 story points, his cycle time is 30/15 = 2, i.e.: 2 hours per point produced, but how to know if this metric is good or bad?
3- Tackt Time
Tackt time comes from the idea of the "ticking clock", not quite true but it helps a lot to remember the concept if you imagine your client looking at the clock while waiting for you to produce the good. Basically it is a measure of how much your client expects you to produce, so if your client demands 60 story points from your member, then we have a tackt time of 30/60 = 1 / 2 hour per point.
4 - WIP
Work in Progress - WIP is a measure to know how much demand our team works at a time. One of the secrets of good management is to limit this value. Remembering the maxim "multitasking is dumb", limiting the WIP helps us focus on what really matters and begins to help us understand whether the process is stable or not. But this is a conversation for another post.
And how can we remove these metrics? The truth is that there is not just one way, it depends a lot on what tools you have at your disposal, there are software programs that calculate these values automatically, but I always consider it a great exercise to learn how to calculate them, and more than that: visualize them. The first point is extensive for this text, but the visualization is quite simple, and is given by our friend kanban:
A tip for those planning to implement such metrics is: don't wait for the process to be perfect, start with what you have today. The metrics at first may be a little crooked, but the important thing is to create early awareness that they exist and help us to be more efficient.