Reporting
8 minutes
Cycle time is the metric your ops team is missing
Volume tells you how busy you are. Cycle time tells you how well you are working — and where the time actually goes.
Priya Raman
Staff Data Scientist
Operations dashboards tend to celebrate volume: tickets closed, orders shipped, requests handled. Volume matters, but it rewards being busy rather than being effective.
What cycle time measures
Cycle time is the elapsed time from when work starts to when it is done. Split it by stage and you get a map of where work waits — which is almost always where the improvement is.
Look at the distribution, not the average
Averages flatter. A process with a three-day average can still leave one request in ten waiting two weeks. Track the 85th percentile alongside the median and the long tail stops hiding.
Median: what a typical request experiences.
85th percentile: what your customers remember.
Wait time share: how much of the cycle is idle.
Start with one process
Pick a process with a clear start and end, instrument the stages, and review the distribution weekly for a month. You will learn more about your operation than any volume chart has told you.
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