You are right: we need both the cycle time AND throughput to make a prediction. The relation between those variables can be defined by this formula:

throughput = (wip / cycle time)

In my example, “the team finishes one story every X days”, the throughput is “one” and the cycle time is “X”, so my prediction works with the (N * X) calculation of remaining days to finish the work, with N being the number of stories to do. In your example, with a cycle time of 10 days and 40 stories, we would still need the throughput to make a correct estimation of remaining days. The formula would be something like (40/throughput) * X. In my example, as the throughput was 1, I didn’t have to divide N by it.

Best regards!
Tiago.

I think you’re actually making your predictions with throughput, not cycle time. In the example above, you might say the team finishes 1 story every day, or 5 stories per week.

You’d have to predict using cycle time differently. Let’s say your cycle time is 10 days and you have 40 stories. (Cycle Time * Stories) here would be 400 days to finish. This would be true if you only had one story in progress at a time, but most teams will have multiple in progress at once. How would you account for that?

There are a few links I could provide, but this one has some drawings which clarify the point.

http://stefanroock.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/kanban-definition-of-lead-time-and-cycle-time/

I really meant “product advancement”, in the sense that we should focus on improving our product so that we can reach our goals, using our KPIs as a guide. We should always advance and not just develop a product, because if we just develop, we can start walking on circles.

Regards,
Tiago.

Focusing on product advancement instead of the development team performance « Tiago Motta Jorge's Professional Blog…