"OK, I got my Lead Time data in a histogram, for a relevant period, and I'm not throwing away any data points. What am I looking at here?"
⏳ If you're looking at a place to begin, start by figuring out what your Customer's "fitness criteria" is when it comes to delivery times: how much time do they think it's reasonable to wait for your service? (where they would like you to be, most of the times: the green line in the diagram below).
😓 Then determine where's the tail for your delivery capability (where you actually are, most of the times: to the left of the red line).
📏 The distance between those two lines is your required "improvement gap" (how much your service needs to improve to become fit for purpose).
🚧 The good news is that the histogram now tells you which work items to go investigate looking for sources of delay to remove, decrease or mitigate. Chances are that the sources of delay that affect those items will also affect many other items in the distribution (including those that were, after all, delivered "fast enough"). Identify the "offending" items, do root cause analysis on them and start improvement initiatives.
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