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Standard : Delivery pace is sustainable and protects team wellbeing

Purpose and Strategic Importance

This standard ensures teams deliver at a sustainable pace that supports long-term wellbeing and performance. It promotes healthy rhythms, reduces burnout, and allows space for learning and continuous improvement.

Aligned to our "Psychological Safety First" policy, this standard helps teams balance urgency with care. Without it, delivery becomes reactive, morale suffers, and long-term velocity declines.

Strategic Impact

Clearly defined impacts of meeting this standard include improved delivery flow, reduced risk, higher system resilience, and better alignment to business needs. Over time, teams will see reduced rework, faster time to value, and stronger system integrity.

Risks of Not Having This Standard

  • Reduced ability to respond to change or failure
  • Accumulation of technical debt or friction
  • Poor developer experience and morale
  • Decreased confidence in releases and features
  • Misalignment between technical implementation and business priorities

CMMI Maturity Model

  • Level 1 – Initial: Delivery is erratic and often driven by reactive demands.

  • Level 2 – Managed: Teams occasionally track delivery pace, but improvement is inconsistent.

  • Level 3 – Defined: Velocity, burnout indicators, and capacity are monitored and reviewed regularly.

  • Level 4 – Quantitatively Managed: Sustainability metrics drive planning decisions.

  • Level 5 – Optimising: Teams adjust rhythms and investments proactively to protect long-term wellbeing.


Key Measures

  • Adoption metrics relevant to the standard (to be defined)
  • Quality, throughput, and system health metrics aligned to capability
  • Maturity scores based on structured assessment
Associated Policies
  • Balance Sustainability with Speed
Associated Practices
  • Error Budget Policies
  • Trunk-Based Development
  • SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs
  • Feature Toggles (Flags)
  • Release Orchestration Tools
  • Strategy & Outcome Mapping
  • Value Stream Mapping
Associated Measures
  • Developer Satisfaction (DevEx NPS)

Technical debt is like junk food - easy now, painful later.

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