Cycle Time

A good production process, in other words, should minimize both ambiguity about what’s going on and the amount of unscheduled communication required to accomplish this work.

However, in the context of product development, the traditional annual budget cycle can easily: Reduce transparency into the actual costs of delivering value — costs are allocated by functional cost centers or by which bucket the money comes from, without an end-to-end product view. Remove decisions from the people doing the work — the upper manage

Software development teams can improve all they like, but if the time from customer need identified to need met hasn’t changed because of bottlenecks in the flow, any local optimization of agility in IT will make little or no difference in the end-to-end time to value.

BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN FEEDBACK LOOP Minimize TOTAL time through the loop

actual practice at Toyota, its best suppliers, and those organizations that have been high-fidelity learners—also employs all three mechanisms. There’s process simplification by way of linearization. This is not just for assembly line operations but, in the extreme, all processes, such as onboarding of new employees, ramp-up production in new produ