{"id":1994,"date":"2025-04-24T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getnave.com\/blog\/?p=1994"},"modified":"2025-05-13T14:06:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T12:06:54","slug":"cycle-time-breakdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getnave.com\/blog\/cycle-time-breakdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Leverage Your Improvement Efforts: Cycle Time Breakdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most efficient ways to achieve a robust and highly productive business operation is to pay close attention to the bottlenecks in your system and manage them effectively.<\/p>\n

In his book \u2018Theory of Constraints\u2019, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt defines a bottleneck as \u201canything that limits a system from achieving higher performance versus its goal\u201d.<\/p>\n

The key to manage these highly undesired success inhibitors is to fully recognize but not fight the symptoms. Instead, managers need to adhere to a comprehensive bottleneck analysis that focuses on boosting performance, leveraging improvement efforts and avoiding crippling delays.<\/p>\n

Where Is Your Time Getting Wasted?<\/b><\/h2>\n

Analyzing our cycle times is the best way to identify bottlenecks which hinder our performance and negatively impact delivery times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As work flows through the process, cards move across the Kanban board<\/a>. Each task spends its time in the different process states and adds up to the time needed to finish what we\u2019ve started. By tracking our cycle times<\/a>, we evaluate the efficiency of our workflow and identify process bottlenecks.<\/p>\n

Evaluating Your Improvement Efforts<\/b><\/h3>\n

To optimize your workflow performance, you need to break your delivery times down to smaller pieces and evaluate the improvement opportunities. This is best achieved in the Cycle Time Breakdown Chart. The diagram displays the cycle times of your completed tasks split by process state. The horizontal axis is a timeline, while the vertical axis tells you how long in total tasks have taken to complete. By glancing over each bar, you can assess how the time spent in each process state affects the overall time needed to finish your work.<\/p>\n

\"Cycle<\/a><\/p>\n

The most important information to get from the Cycle Time Breakdown Chart is how the data changes in time. It is an indicator of continuous improvement. If the longest sections are going down, this is a sign that your improvement efforts are paying off. But, if the cycle times are going up, it is better to take a step back and analyze the reasons behind that behavior.<\/p>\n

Analyzing Your Workflow Performance<\/b><\/h3>\n

The Cycle Time Breakdown can be of great help when it comes to bottleneck analysis<\/a>. This is best achieved by looking into your process state cycle times vs the overall cycle time needed to finish your work. Spotting the states with the longest sections on the diagram, analyzing their cycle times and identifying the root causes of delays is a tremendous step towards improving flow efficiency<\/a> and reducing delivery times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Cycle<\/a><\/p>\n

A quick glance at the Cycle Time Breakdown reveals the states in our workflow that slow us down the most. This insight provides a good basis for further investigation and selection of remedies for improving workflow performance. The steps that have taken the most of the time, impeding the entire flow, become glaringly obvious. That instantly fires off the alarm and helps us start asking the right questions, sooner.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Product managers from various industries leverage the power of making data-driven decisions using Kanban analytics. It is fast, simple and extremely effective. <\/i>Try it out for free on your favorite platform<\/i>.<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

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Highlight the Disruptive Nature of Your Waiting Times<\/b><\/h2>\n

The approach of analyzing our data using the Cycle Time Breakdown is extremely powerful if we maintain a Kanban pull system<\/a>. Kanban pull systems enable users to assess how much time the workflow sits in each queue state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the example below, we have a process with the following steps – Development, Code Review, Testing, Deployment and Done, and the queue states Code review (Done) and Testing (Done). On the Cycle Time Breakdown, it is clearly visible that 20% of the workflow is spent in the Code Review (Done) step. As this is a queue state, it means that our work is not able to move to Testing, it is just sitting and waiting in the queue due to a bottleneck in the Testing state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Cycle<\/a><\/p>\n

An obvious solution may be to hire more testing specialists. We could assume that adding more testing capacity would remove the bottleneck. This approach is also known as \u201celevating the constraint\u201d. However, it costs both time and money. So, rather than jumping immediately to elevation, it might be better to try to fully exploit the capacity of the people responsible for that step and relieve them from activities that could be handled by someone else or completely nixed. For instance, testers are quite commonly also responsible for creating user manuals. This can be very easily handed over to other departments.<\/p>\n

Another alternative is to assign some of the idle team members to that step. You can categorize your work using risk profiles to specify the requirements that must be tested by the professional test team and delegate those that could be covered by people from other functional areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The team performance will increase by 20% only by resolving the bottleneck in their Testing step. Their customers will receive what they have requested 20% faster, which will lead to a significant rise in customer satisfaction and so a firm loyalty to your brand.<\/p>\n

The Best Course of Action<\/b><\/h2>\n

Here are some tips to help you improve your workflow performance once you have identified the bottlenecks in your system.<\/p>\n