#156 – Feature Delivery Lead Time

It’s a sensible ambition to reduce the time it takes for an idea to be delivered and improve the lives of the end users. Mapping out the steps that a Feature (or any other PBI) goes through from it’s spawned as an idea until its value is consumed by the end user is the first step in identifying where to improve in order to potentially shorten it.

Generally, the solution is not to ‘code faster’, but to identify where the wait times are in the full process (e.g., waiting for an approval by InfoSec or Data Warehouse needing to make a change), and to reduce or fully eliminate these wait times–in Lean terms, ‘maximize the flow efficiency’. These places where the flow is halted should then be attacked ferociously by your Scrum Masters, as the causes of the wait times are often symptoms of local or systemic impediments.