# Lead time Lead time is the elapsed time between when a piece of work is requested (or committed to) and when it is delivered. It measures how long the person waiting for the result actually waits. The term comes from manufacturing and lean, where it runs from customer order to delivery. Lead time includes [[Cycle time]] (the time from when work actually starts to when it finishes) plus all the time the item sat in a queue before anyone started it. When lead time is much longer than cycle time, the problem is not how fast you work but how much you accept: work waits because too much was committed at once. [[Little's Law]] explains why: the more items in the system, the longer each one waits. The exact start and end points vary by context, so always state them. DORA, for example, uses "change lead time" in software delivery: the time for a change to go from committed to version control to deployed in production. For personal task management, a practical definition is from capture (or the moment you commit to the task) to done. ## References - DORA's software delivery performance metrics: https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics-four-keys/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/lead-time/ ## Related - [[Cycle time]] - [[Little's Law]] - [[Work In Progress (WIP)]] - [[Limit Work In Progress]] - [[Kanban Methodology]] - [[DevOps]]