Metrics for measuring product development cycle time

As global competitive pressure increases and product life cycles compress, many companies are trying to shorten their product development cycles. Firms are implementing a wide variety of different techniques, management processes and development strategies in their quest for shorter development cycles. We read anecdotal accounts of some efforts that herald great success stories but seldom hear about any failures. Unfortunately, some of the companies changing their development processes do so without any a priori basis for determining whether the process change will have helped or hindered them. The firm implements the new process without having a cycle time performance baseline against which to compare results from the new process. In this article, Abbie Griffin presents a method for obtaining product development cycle time performance baselines. She also demonstrates how to use them to either forecast expected project duration, given that you have not changed your development process, or determine whether a process change has actually decreased development cycle times.