 I was at this conference last year and I overheard somebody ask a vendor at their booth if their tool excluded weekends from lead time metrics. And I asked him, why do you want to exclude weekends? And he said, my team doesn't work weekends. I don't want that to count against us. I said, how is it that lead time metrics count against you? He said, it's in my goals, it's on my performance review. I think this is a big problem and I said so on Twitter and people came back and said I want to hear more about it, so here I am. There are three main reasons why I believe excluding weekends or any time people aren't thought to be working from metrics is a bad idea. Reason number one is that all you have to do to discredit a metric is to question the assumption. Let me demonstrate. So are you saying you never work any weekends? What about holidays? Should we go with US holidays or UK holidays? Should we look at all the vacation days people actually take or the ones that they qualify for? What if we just took the actual hours that people worked? I jumped ahead. What about sick days? Anybody work when they're sick? What if we just took the time that people actually worked? Let's just look at lead time and hours. Does everybody always work a 40-hour work week? How much time are we willing to spend debating assumptions so that we can make our metrics credible? Reason number two, lead time exclusions encourage is gaming of the data. What happens when resource utilization decisions are made based off of time sheets? How accurate are those estimates? I've seen people attribute 100% of their time to one single project because they thought I would otherwise reflect poorly on them. That data was wrong and what sources that everybody knew it. When people work weekends but don't count that time, the metrics can be deceptively reassuring. Isidore Duncan says that we only see two things in people. The stuff that we want to see and the stuff that they're willing to show us. And if people are concerned about or they're unable to reveal, they don't want to reveal things to us. We lose transparency. There's no transparency in that. Using metrics to shame people encourages gaming and same thing with target driven metrics. When the focus is on the metric itself instead of not the goal, we've got a problem. Reason number three is that business customers, they care about duration. If you're my customer and you ask me how long it's going to take for that feature to be delivered and I tell you 30 days from now, you're not going to be happy if 30 days from now you discover that it's another 11 days because weekends and holidays don't matter. That's not going to fly. In my experience, I haven't heard customers care about how long it took in dev or test. They want to know about the duration. Lead time is a measure of duration. It has a start time and an end time. That's all. Lead time doesn't do start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. That's going to be wait time and work time and wait time. What lead time does do for us, what lead time does do for us is it quantifies the probability of completing X percent of work in so many days. And that's what allows us to be more predictable. That's what allows us to say, look, 95 percent of our work can be done in 15 days or less. So there's always going to be variability in our system due to whatever, unplanned work, holidays, sick days. Let's credit leadership for understanding that a request coming in on a day before a three-day weekend is going to have a longer lead time. They'll be more appreciative of the accuracy. The visibility of accurate metrics is what helps us make good decisions, but it totally depends on the transparency of others. So let's help people be okay with truth. If you want more predictability in your organization, then make your metrics credible. And that means including weekends. Thank you.