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InfoQ Homepage Presentations How to Scale Lead Time

How to Scale Lead Time

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Summary

Ilona Kędracka and Chris Matts share their experience of what is needed to scale lead time to an organization of five thousand people.

Bio

Ilona Kędracka is an Electrical engineer by profession, retired hula-hoop dance instructor and avid learner of anything related to business analysis and communication science. Chris Matts has co-created the GIVEN-WHEN-THEN format, discovered real options, staff liquidity (Skills Matrix), and Capacity Planning (Delivery Mapping).

About the conference

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is committed to making IT good for society. We use the power of our network to bring about positive, tangible change. We champion the global IT profession and the interests of individuals, engaged in that profession, for the benefit of all.

Recorded at:

Jul 21, 2019

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Community comments

  • A few quibbles

    by Johnny FromCanada,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    The intent behind this new metric is not well-articulated. By invoking cost, it smells of Earned Value Management. "We need a productivity metric for Engineering" certainly sounds highly dysfunctional, especially from a Lean-Agile perspective.

    I like the idea of weighted metrics; but calling it a Lead Time seems inappropriate for the described purpose. Lead Time is a duration (elapsed time) as experienced by an external entity (in particular, your customer), which does not care what costs you incur internally. So Lead Time of a department is effectively the duration across the critical path of the sub-department teams, regardless of their individual lead times.

    Little's Law is already pretty effective for analysis involving Lead Time. So it is hard to tell what we are gaining here via some new novel metric.

    Lead Time does not have a Normal distribution (perhaps Log-Normal or Weibull). So arithmetic mean is not appropriate (instead consider geometric mean). Regardless, if all you are doing is relative comparisons and trending, then you should be fine.

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