What are the benefits and trade-offs of agile cycle time?

Along with this, it's important to keep in mind that, in knowledge work, work is going to take as long as it takes. A team may be running at high efficiency and still have longer cycle times than a team that is running at lower efficiency. Especially when we talk about things like "increasing customer satisfaction." At a general level, if you are developing things sooner, you are increasing customer satisfaction, but it's also important to balance that with the idea that more intensive features are going to take longer no matter what you do.

To clarify, the end milestone of Cycle time is once the work has been Release. Not when its Done on the kanban board Not when it is a Dark Deployment

The CFD is not a good way to measure cycle time. Not only is it an average (which makes it useless), it's an approximate average. I love my CFD, but I highly encourage people not to use it to measure cycle time. Use a scatterplot or histogram specifically keyed to cycle time, especially one that shows you the percentages of how much of your dataset falls under different cycle times. It's also not uncommon to measure more than one "cycle time" based on how that data is used. It's usually a good idea to visually represent on your kanban board where the clock starts and stops.

Cycle time is a Lean metric. To reduce cycle time, 1- create your flow's Value Stream Map. 2- Map the value & non-value (waste) times. 3- Focus on the non-value times first. 4- Optimize the system as a whole.

Efficient and frequent backlog grooming of requirements helps understanding, planning and prioritizing work items and effort estimations which further helps with proper task breakdowns during planning sessions reducing speculation and structural design overhead.

The amount of other things you have in progress is possibly the biggest contributor to cycle time there is (other than the time the work naturally takes). This is mathematically expressed in "Little's Law." If you want individual items to be completed more quickly, have fewer individual items being worked on at once. This is common sense that we all apply to our daily schedules, but for some reason this reasoning goes out the window when we're talking about product development initiatives.

Very well said. Wanted to share few things we did to ensure lower WIP - - utilize tools to full extent to provide early warnings of bottlenecks - Stop - Start strategy. Dont / delay start a new one until the former is complete - Retrospect very specifically on situation - not at an overall sprint level - Engage everyone in team - Its the core of agile!