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Cycle and lead time report
The cycle and lead time report helps you understand how long it takes to deliver work — so you can more accurately set delivery dates. Use it to visualize two metrics for a set of records:
Cycle time: How long it takes your team to complete work once they have started
Lead time: How long it takes your team to complete work once it is assigned to them
You can also configure Custom status ranges or filter the report by particular record types, tags, or members of your team. Use percentile lines to understand the range of delivery times that are typical for your team, and spot when work falls outside of the norm. You can also set a target cycle or lead time and measure how well your team is tracking against it.
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Configure the report
To access the cycle and lead time report, navigate to Reports -> Cycle & lead time. By default, the report looks at the cycle time for all records your team completed in the last six weeks. But you can adjust these filters to fit your need.
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Status range: This is the range of workflow statuses you want the report to consider. Choose from:
Cycle time: The time it takes your team to complete a record after they begin work — between the statuses In progress and Completed. This is selected by default.
Lead time: The time it takes your team to complete a record after the record is assigned to them — between the statuses Not started and Completed.
Custom: The time between any two statuses you select.
Record type: Narrow your report to a specific record type. By default, the report looks at Epics, Features, and Requirements.
Tags: Narrow your report to records with a specific tag. Use tags to indicate different types of work, sections of your product, or anything else useful to your team.
Users: Narrow your report to specific team members to show individual cycle times.
Date range: At the right side of the report, set a date range. Choose between six weeks, three months, six months, one year, or a custom range.
If you select the Features record type, you have a few additional filters to choose from.
Feature type: Refine the report by feature type.
Add filter (+): Choose from custom fields on the feature layout you have chosen for your team. You can filter your estimates by any custom number fields, predefined choice lists, or editable choice lists.
The cycle and lead time report — and these additional filter options — visualize the same data that is used in the Suggested initial estimate capacity planning team setting.
Use the report
The cycle and lead time time report shows you every record that fits your selected configuration. Records are plotted as dots based on when they completed your selected Status range and how many days they took. They are colored by their record type.
Hover on any data point to see a summary of it, including record name, the number of days it took to complete the Status range, and the day it was completed.
Click on any data point to open the drawer view of the affected record or a list report of all records that completed the Status range on that day. When you are done, click outside the drawer to close it and return to your report.
You can also use the report to identify trends. The dotted lines indicate percentiles, to indicate how quickly 50%, 70%, 85%, and 95% of work is delivered.
Open the Chart information sidebar to see a Summary of your team's cycle or lead time by percentile lines
Configure delivery targets
If your team adheres to specific Service Level Agreements, Service Level Expectations, or even internal delivery targets, you can configure these by expanding the Chart information sidebar. To do this:
Click on Configuration
Select the statistical Percentiles that you want to track. By default, all are enabled.
Set the number of Target days that your team wants to set. For example, you may have a target to Complete features within 30 days, or to move requirements from Not started to In progress in under two weeks. The number you set here will add a Target line to your report, and the summary of your Percentile lines will be colored red or green to indicate whether they successfully meet your target days.
Adjust the Data boundaries to remove outliers or to focus on a specific range of days.
Best practices
The cycle time and lead time report can be a powerful tool to indicate your team's efficiency and identify any bottlenecks in your workflow. Use these tips to optimize it.
The report works best when you can compare work of the same size (whether that is in points or time). Use the Record type and Tag filters to make sure that report shows records that can reasonably be compared to each other.
Click on outliers in the report to see if they indicate a rare aberration from the average — or a risk you need to mitigate better.
Set custom Status ranges to analyze individual stages in your workflow. Maybe testing takes a disproportionate amount of time, or security review is more efficient with features than epics.
View your data through the Target days your team needs to meet. You will be able to see at a glance whether your team mostly delivers on time, or where it has work to do.