How many defects are in your defect queue? How fast do they arrive? At what rate do they get resolved? At that rate, how many days, weeks, months, or years of work do you have in your defect queue? How many of the defects in your queue do you have a reasonable expectation to resolve? How much time do you spend on managing and reviewing the queue? Is it worth it?
2
How many requests are on your list of things to do? At what rate do they arrive? How much time, on the average, has already been spent on each item? How much time do you spend on managing and reviewing the queue? How much work (in days, weeks, months, or years) do you have on your list of things to do? Do you keep things in the list that you will never get around to? Why? What percent of the queue does this represent?
3
Does high utilization of people's available time cause logjams in your environment? Does your organization measure "resource" (i.e., people) utilization? If so, what kind of impact does this measurement have: Is it taken seriously? Does it drive behavior? Is that behavior beneficial?
4
What determines your batch size: Release schedule? Project size? Can you reduce time between releases or the size of projects? What is a reasonable target? What would it take to change to that target?
5
At a team meeting, review the list of ways to reduce cycle time:
Even Out the Arrival of Work
Minimize the Number of Things in Process
Minimize the Size of Things in Process
Establish a Regular Cadence
Limit Work to Capacity
Use Pull Scheduling
Which one of these shows the most promise for your environment? Experiment by implementing the most promising approach and measure what happens to cycle time.
