Glossary
Cadence audit
A cadence audit is the Priority Churn fix recipe's first step: a written record of every change of strategic direction in the last two quarters, what the previous priority cost the team, and what — if anything — was explicitly de-prioritised in its place.
A cadence audit is the Priority Churn fix recipe's first step. The leadership team writes down every change of strategic direction in the last two quarters, what the previous priority cost the team to ship, and what was explicitly de-prioritised when the new priority was announced. Most cadence audits surface a third column with no entries.
The point of the audit is not to litigate past decisions. It is to make the cost of churn visible to the room that is producing it. Once the cost is on the wall, the discipline of explicitly de-prioritising the displaced work becomes much easier to hold.
The platform records cadence audits against the Priority Churn architecture and surfaces aging audits on The Mirror so the next priority change has a written record to be measured against.
How it is measured
- Coverage: share of priority changes in the audit window with both a documented cost and a documented de-prioritisation.
- Audit recurrence: months elapsed since the last cadence audit was recorded.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →