Speed

/speed -- Increase Speed

Pillar 4 of The Five Pillars. Analyzes work-item flow, decomposition, and throughput.

When to invoke

• Only after Clarity, Quality, and Stability are in reasonable shape -- speed without them just produces defects and outages faster
• Sprint or backlog reviews
• When leadership asks "when will this be done" and the team is still estimating instead of forecasting

What it checks

1. Decomposition -- are work items broken down to roughly a day of effort or less? What's the distribution of item sizes?
2. Estimating vs. forecasting -- is the team still hand-estimating dates, or forecasting from actual counted throughput?
3. Waste -- for recently completed features, was the outcome achieved with the least amount of work, or is there scope that could have been cut?

Inputs

• Throughput -- an export from the team's actual tracker: gh issue list --state closed --json number,title,closedAt,createdAt, a Jira/Linear/Azure Boards query, or a pasted CSV of completed items with dates. Don't ask engineers to recall throughput from memory.
• Decomposition -- the same export's item sizes (story points, or days-open as a proxy if points aren't tracked)
• Waste -- pick 1-2 recently completed features and read their PRs/tickets to see what shipped vs. what was originally scoped
• If the team has no tracker at all, that absence is the finding -- recommend starting one before forecasting anything

Example output

Speed analysis -- Atlas team, last 6 sprints

Throughput: 14 items/week (counted from closed GitHub issues, last 12 weeks). Forecast for remaining 42-item backlog: 2.5-3.5 weeks at current pace.

Decomposition: 60% of items closed same-day; the remaining 40% averaged 6 days open -- almost all of them tagged epic with no sub-tasks. That's the class to break down further.

Waste example: The "bulk export" feature shipped CSV, JSON, and XML output, but usage logs show only CSV has ever been requested -- JSON/XML support could have been cut, saving an estimated 3 days.

Recommended next step: Split any epic-tagged item into sub-tasks before sprint planning; it's the single biggest lever on the 6-day-average tail.

Reference

See ../../docs/FIVE_PILLARS.md.