Delivery intelligence glossary

Delivery intelligence is the practice of turning raw engineering activity (commits, pull requests, issues, and tickets) into real-time, outcome-level insight about what is actually shipping and what is stuck.

A Work Unit is a delivery outcome, like "Payment System" or "Mobile App Release", that groups related GitHub and Jira activity so progress can be measured against something a stakeholder recognizes.

A delivery forecast is a data-driven estimate of when a Work Unit will be completed, derived from the actual historical pace of the organization’s own completed work rather than from a manually entered due date.

Cycle time is the elapsed time between when work actively starts and when it is delivered, the single most reliable measure of how quickly a team turns committed work into shipped outcomes.

Bottleneck detection is the automatic identification of where delivery is being held up (a stalled review, a blocked ticket, a Work Unit that has stopped moving) so it can be addressed before it derails a deadline.