Why every number you report improves as the gap opens
Every figure you send upward gets better during exactly the period when this is happening, and that is not a coincidence.
This is the step that explains why nobody has told you about this. Every figure you report to your own leadership gets better during exactly the interval when the gap is opening, and every one of those figures is correct.
Work through it. More is produced, so throughput rises. Less of it waits for somebody to look at it, so time-to-ship falls. The queue of things waiting on a person gets shorter, because fewer things are waiting on a person. Each of those is a real improvement in the thing it measures.
| what improves | why it improves | what it is not evidence about |
|---|---|---|
| throughput | more is produced | whether more is right |
| time to ship | less of it waits on a person | whether it should have waited on a person |
| queue depth | fewer things are queued for judgment | whether the judgment was needed |
| reviewer load | unchanged, because reviewers are a fixed capacity | this one is the tell, and nobody reports it |
The last row is worth dwelling on
Reviewer load usually does not move, because it cannot — the same people have the same hours. From the outside that looks like stability. What it actually means is that the examined quantity is pinned while the produced quantity grows, which is the gap, visible in a number you already have and do not report.