Lean from the Trenches

Process Cycle Efficiency

We don’t measure process cycle efficiency, but I mention it here because it’s one of those things we kind of wish we did measure. If our Kanban board was mirrored in an electronic system, we would definitely measure process cycle efficiency, but in our currently pure manual Kanban system, it would be too fiddly.

Anyway, here’s what it means:

Elapsed time means how many days the feature took to cross the project board (= cycle time).

Touch time means how many days the feature was actually worked on (or “touched”). In other words, it’s how many days that card spent in work in progress columns, as opposed to queue/buffer ...