Definition
Cycle Time
Cycle time is how long an issue takes from the moment work actively starts on it to the moment it is done. Measured in hours or days, it captures the team's hands-on flow efficiency. Shorter, more consistent cycle times mean a more predictable system — the core flow metric Kanban teams optimize.
Key takeaways
- Cycle time is how long an issue takes from the moment active work starts on it to the moment it is done — the team's hands-on flow efficiency.
- It excludes backlog wait time, isolating how long the team takes once a piece of work is picked up.
- Its power is the distribution, not the average: the 85th-percentile figure makes honest delivery forecasts ('most work ships within five days').
- Cycle time and WIP are linked by Little's Law — the more work in progress, the longer each item takes, so limiting WIP is the direct lever to pull it down.
Cycle time starts the clock when an issue enters an active working state — typically 'in progress' — and stops it when the issue reaches 'done.' It deliberately excludes the time an item waited in the backlog beforehand, isolating how long the team itself takes to push a piece of work through once it has been picked up.
Its real power is in distribution, not the single average. Plotting every issue's cycle time reveals the spread: a tight cluster signals a predictable team, while a long tail of outliers points to issues that got stuck, blocked, or were secretly too big. Teams use that 85th-percentile figure to make honest delivery forecasts — 'most work ships within five days' is a promise you can keep.
Cycle time and WIP are linked by Little's Law: the more work in progress, the longer each item's cycle time. This is why limiting WIP is the most direct lever for pulling cycle time down. Reducing it rarely means working faster; it means finishing what is started before starting more.
Planoda records state-transition timestamps on every issue and computes cycle time automatically, so the distribution and percentiles are available without manual tracking.
Related terms
- Lead TimeLead time is the total elapsed time from when an issue is first created or requested to when it is delivered. Unlike cycle time, it includes the waiting period in the backlog before work begins. Lead time reflects the customer's experience of how long a request actually takes end to end.
- ThroughputThroughput is the number of work items a team completes in a given period — issues finished per week, for example. It is the simplest flow metric: a direct count of output over time. Tracked across periods, throughput reveals a team's real delivery capacity and is the basis for probabilistic, estimate-free forecasting.
- WIP LimitA WIP (work-in-progress) limit is a cap on how many items may be active in a given workflow stage at once. By forcing a team to finish work before starting more, WIP limits expose bottlenecks, reduce context-switching, and shorten cycle time. They are the core mechanism that makes Kanban flow rather than pile up.
- KanbanKanban is a visual workflow method that maps work onto a board of columns representing stages — typically backlog, in progress, and done. Cards move left to right as work advances. It emphasizes continuous flow, making bottlenecks visible, and limiting work in progress rather than committing to fixed time-boxes.