The 85th Percentile Part 2

 Thank you. Explain the value in the team knowing their 85th percentile cycle time.

The 85th percentile cycle time is a significant metric for Agile and Lean software engineering teams because it provides a reliable indicator of their delivery capability while accounting for variability in task completion times. Here's the value in a team knowing their 85th percentile cycle time: ### Predictable Delivery Estimates - **Setting Realistic Expectations**: By knowing the 85th percentile cycle time, a team can give stakeholders a delivery estimate that they are confident can be met 85% of the time. This is more reliable than using averages, which can be skewed by outliers. - **Better Forecasting**: This percentile helps in forecasting completion dates for work items by indicating how long the majority of tasks are likely to take without being overly optimistic or pessimistic. ### Improved Decision Making - **Prioritization of Work**: Understanding how long tasks are likely to take helps in prioritizing and sequencing work based on risk and value. - **Capacity Planning**: Knowing the cycle time at this percentile allows for better capacity planning for future sprints or iterations. ### Quality of Service - **Meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs)**: If a team has service level agreements or commitments to external or internal customers, knowing the 85th percentile helps ensure these SLAs can be reliably met. - **Improving Customer Satisfaction**: Predictable delivery builds trust with customers and stakeholders because it sets a realistic expectation that is consistently met. ### Process Improvement - **Identifying Process Inefficiencies**: If the 85th percentile cycle time is longer than desired, it can prompt a team to look for process inefficiencies or bottlenecks. - **Focused Improvement Efforts**: Teams can use this metric to measure the impact of process changes. If changes are effective, they should see the 85th percentile cycle time decrease over time. ### Managing Variability - **Handling Uncertainty**: The 85th percentile accounts for the natural variability in task sizes and effort, providing a buffer that makes the metric more stable against this variability. - **Risk Management**: This percentile also helps teams manage risk by understanding and preparing for the 'usual' upper bounds of cycle times. ### Encouraging Sustainable Pace - **Avoiding Burnout**: By not promising delivery based on best-case scenarios (which might require overtime or cutting corners to achieve), teams can maintain a sustainable working pace. ### Benchmarking - **Comparing Performance Over Time**: Teams can track how this percentile changes over time, which can be a benchmark for continuous improvement. - **Industry Comparison**: Comparing with industry benchmarks allows a team to understand their performance relative to peers or to standards. In practical application, while the median (50th percentile) cycle time tells you what your typical cycle time is, the 85th percentile cycle time provides a more comprehensive view that takes into account deviations and outliers, ensuring that planning and commitments are both realistic and achievable most of the time. It strikes a balance between under-committing (which might happen if you used, say, the 95th percentile) and over-promising (which might happen if you used the median or average cycle times).