A recurring question we have is when does the timer starts for a Deliverable, and when does it end. Should the timer end when the feature is released, in other words available to user? Let's dig down the question and how we think it.
First, what is a Deliverable?
In short, it is our agile agnostic glossary to express a feature or an epic. Something big enough to be followed by stakeholders. Learn more here.
What is a Lead Time?
In theory, a lead time starts when the customer requests an idea and ends when the customer receives its value.
In Axify, we calculate the lead time on deliverables when the deliverables is created until it is marked as done. Learn more about how we think lead time and value stream.
Does it end once it is available/released to users?
Short answer, no.
It ends when the Deliverables is marked as done. In Axify, we really want to distinguish the development process from the discovery/release process.
For most of Engineering Leaders, we tend to want predictable delivery process. Our job is to deliver features in the most predictable way, in a releasable state, allowing the business to release or not the feature we developed. Releasing is a business decision, not a technical decision. There could be many reasons to release a feature long after its development is completed, so it would be suggest a very different metric.
In our vision of Axify, while today is more focused on delivery predictability, we want to improve the Value Stream capabilities to offer a more complete value stream (from idea to customer availability/release) and having the ability to drilldown into sub-phases (i.e. the development phase).
We also consider to add the capability to configure a deliverable cycle time with a custom starting point and a custom ending point.