Cycle Time
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.
Cycle time measures flow. For a pull request, it is the time from first commit to merge; for a Work Unit, it is the time from the first activity to the point the outcome is delivered. Unlike velocity or story points, cycle time is denominated in something everyone understands, days, and it is hard to inflate, which makes it one of the most trustworthy delivery metrics available.
The reason cycle time matters more than raw output is that it captures friction. A team can be busy and still slow if work sits waiting for review, blocked on dependencies, or stuck in QA. Cycle time exposes that waiting. When it trends up, something in the delivery pipeline is degrading, even if the volume of activity looks healthy.
LiveIndex computes cycle time at multiple levels (per pull request, per Work Unit, and across the organization) and tracks it longitudinally so you can see whether delivery is speeding up or slowing down over weeks and months. Sudden increases feed directly into bottleneck detection.
Because it is derived from real GitHub and Jira timestamps, the cycle time LiveIndex reports is an observed fact about your delivery process, not an estimate.