18 March 2026
Cycle time without the stopwatch
A stopwatch on a shoulder changes the work. People tidy the bench. They skip the unofficial walk to the printer. You measure a performance of the job, then wonder why the dashboard never matched the week.
Most Australian operations already timestamp something: a dispatch scan, a ticket open, an email that should not be the system of record and yet is. Harvest those first. You will get a lumpy picture. Lumpiness is information. It usually points at a wait, not at a person who “needs to be faster”.
Cycle-Time Field Notes exists because teams skip this harvest and buy a tracking layer. The layer then becomes another dual system. We would rather teach you to argue with the timestamps you already paid for.
If there are no timestamps at all, that is a finding, not a reason to invent them on a clipboard for three heroic days. Invented timestamps rot the moment the consultant leaves.