Ask the queue, not the team

When delivery feels slow, the instinct is to ask the team why. The team will answer with whatever hurt most recently, which is honest and rarely the bottleneck.

Ask the queue instead. Take the last twenty changes that shipped and, for each, write down where its calendar time actually went: waiting for review, waiting for tests, waiting for an environment, waiting for a window, being worked on. Sum the columns.

In nearly every system we have read, the being-worked-on column is the smallest, and the largest column surprises the room. The team was never slow. The change was idle, in specific places, for specific reasons, each one fixable and none of them a person.

Twenty changes, one afternoon, five columns. The rest of the diagnosis is commentary.