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When a feature flows through the value stream, it spends a certain amount of time being worked on, and a certain amount of time waiting. The amount of time spent waiting in the queue is known as queue time.

Queues are hidden all over the value stream and can have a big impact on business agility.

The backlog is a good example of a queue. Usually, only the top few items in the backlog are worked on. The rest of the items in the backlog are queued. This means most items on the backlog spend far more time waiting in a queue than being executed.

In the above example, it takes one week to complete a feature, and there are 9 features waiting in the queue. The last feature in the queue will have a lead time of 10 weeks.

This means that if a great new opportunity is identified now, it will be exploited only two to three months later – even though it takes just a week to exploit it. In contrast, a team that maintains an empty queue will be able to act on the opportunity and exploit it within a week. The lead time is down from ten weeks to one week, simply by keeping the queue empty.

Webinar on Leveraging Enterprise Kanban

I’ll be expanding on these ideas in a free, one hour webinar on Leveraging Enterprise Kanban. The webinar will happen on the 19th of January, 9:30 PM IST (see time in other timezones). Sign up for the webinar to join the discussion.

Related posts:

1. Team Agility To Business Agility – Silver Stories Open To Public
2. Are you delivering business value?
3. Business Problem #1: Losing sight of the big picture
4. The need for Enterprise Kanban
5. Tying risk models together with class of service