Shortening Lead Times?

Hi all! One of the goals at my client is to cut the lead times in half. It is difficult, and for inspiration they would like to hear success stories. Have you worked in a big “insert framework here”-organization where you managed to cut lead times?

This question was posed in an internal communication channel and it is a very good conversation to have in any organization. Personally I have plenty of stories surrounding this topic, successes and failures but immediately three thoughts came to mind.

Thought number 1:

Simple! Just do fewer things in parallel and Lead Time will improve.

Thought number 2:

The proof for Little’s law has been around for more than 60 years and with that we know that by doing fewer things in parallel we will improve lead time. We also know that queue size is a leading indicator of lead time. This leads us to the simple implementation of trashing all Enterprise-level queues/backlogs, e.g., the software development roadmap. By maximizing responsiveness, you minimize waiting times which is commonly the largest culprit driving up lead times in software development systems.

But this is where I say that dogmatically pursuing improvements in lead time is not a good idea as it will not be practical. Any optimization will come at a cost, and it rarely makes sense from a business perspective with such narrow optimization. To maximize business outcomes, you will need to balance a multitude of goals and factors to find your sweet spot of responsiveness vs executing your strategic plan.

It is in this balance that I have found myself struggling many times in the past. When presented with a goal, such as “cut lead time in half” you can quite quickly come up with many workable solutions that will do just that. However, they oftentimes get shut down by executive management for reasons they cannot get into. I have found that the answer lies in the pursuit of this balance. That the true goal is not to dogmatically minimize lead time, because that is relatively simple, the goal is more likely to be that we need to maximize “something” via a belief that reducing lead time will have that effect in the end. All the while we also need to adhere to certain constraints (e.g., we want to accelerate growth while maintaining our current level of engagement). Maintaining engagement in this example is a constraining factor that we are not willing to sacrifice.

This is the point where you need to consider Organizational Alignment, i.e., how well do people understand the dynamics between different teams & departments and products & services that should all contribute to the success of the company in the end. Organizational Alignment is about finding the shared goals throughout the organization that every department and team can align towards. You need to incorporate all the goals of the organization and identify the goal directly above in the goal-hierarchy they should all contribute to. One goal I have found to be a very strong candidate is Predictable Delivery to enable better Strategic Decision Making.

Thought number 3:

I have been in these conversations enough times that I wrote a -> book <- with my long-form response.

Simplifying Complexity