Also called "time from concept to cash".
Important to: Everyone, especially the CEO, CIO and CTO.
Definition:
How long does it take a new average feature, idea, fix or any other kind of change to get into a paying customer's hands, in production, from the moment of inception in someone's mind. MTTC is what it takes you from the moment you see an opportunity until you can actually utilize it. The faster MTTC is, the faster you can react to market changes.
How to measure:
We start counting from moment of the change's inception in someone's head (Imagine a marketing person coming up with a competing idea to that of a competitor's product, or a bug being reported by a customer)
One way to capture and measure mean time to change is by doing a value streaming exercise, as we will touch on in a later chapter in this book.
Expected Outcome: MTTC should become shorter and shorter as DevOps maturity grows.
Common Misunderstandings:
MTTC is not the same as the often cited "Change lead time" as proposed in multiple online publications.
Change Lead time (at least as far as I could see) only counts the time from the start of development of a feature, when real coding begins.
MTTC will measure everything that leads up to the coding as well, which might include design reviews, change committees, budgeting meetings, resource scheduling and everything that stands in the way of an idea as it makes its way into the development team, all the way through to production and the customer.
From a CEO, CIO and CTO view , MTTC is one of the most important key metrics to capture. Unfortunately, many organizations today do not measure this.
In many companies I've worked with, MTTC was anywhere from one month to twelve months.