Why Measuring Individual Cycle Time Fails to Help Teams

I still see teams measuring individual cycle time as if that tells them anything useful. It doesn’t.

If you’re measuring a person’s speed, you’re missing the point. The problem is never the individual—it’s the system they’re operating in. You don’t measure a single cog in a machine; you measure how well the whole thing runs.

When work sits in queues, when reviews take forever, when people are overloaded with work in progress—those are the real bottlenecks. Measuring how fast someone moves a ticket through their own swim lane tells you nothing about flow.

Want to move faster? Stop monitoring individuals. Start looking at lead time, throughput, and process cycle efficiency (PCE). Fix the system, and the people will be able to do great work.

Where have you seen individual measurement lead to bad incentives? Drop your thoughts in the comments.