How a Pipeline Audit Works

The order of operations, the bottlenecks that show up most often, and what a studio gets at the end.

A pipeline audit is a structured look at how work moves through a production, from concept to ship. The goal is to find where time is lost: where work waits, where handoffs break, and where estimates drift away from reality. It is not a culture survey and it is not a process template. It is a map of the work.

The order of operations

I run audits in the same order every time, because each step changes what I look for in the next one.

1. Talk to people individually

Group meetings give you the official version of how things work. 1:1s give you the real one. I talk to leads and to the people doing the work, because they often describe the same problem in very different ways.

2. Map the work and where it waits

I trace how a typical piece of work moves through each phase and each discipline. The useful part is not where the work happens. It is where the work sits, waiting on a review, a decision, or an asset from another team.

3. Compare estimates to reality

What did the team expect a task to take, and what did it actually take? A consistent gap in one area tells you more than any single complaint.

4. Look one step upstream of whoever is complaining

The discipline raising the alarm is usually the one feeling the problem, not the one causing it. The cause tends to sit one step earlier in the pipeline.

The bottlenecks I see most often

The complaining discipline is not the stuck one

On The Last of Us: Part I, art looked like the bottleneck. Ten months from internal ship, everyone felt overscoped and nobody had data. When I scoped the work bottoms-up with every designer, the real issue sat one step upstream. Combat design had not locked its sections and did not know how much work remained. Art was waiting on decisions that had not been made yet. It was a design production problem that showed up in art.

No definition of "done" per phase

If a phase has no clear exit criteria, work never really leaves it. When I joined BulletFarm there was no shared view of completed work. Without a definition of done for each phase, nobody could say what was finished, so nobody could say what was left.

A team structure built for a different game

Studios often carry their structure over from a previous project. When the new game needs people to collaborate differently, they end up working in isolation, and disciplines rebuild each other's assets because the structure never connected them.

Late review gates

When the first serious review happens late, the feedback arrives after the team has already built on top of the work in question. Every change becomes rework, and the schedule absorbs it.

Hidden load on senior people

Senior staff quietly absorb unblocking, approvals, and coordination. None of it appears on the schedule, so it stays invisible until their own work slips.

What you get at the end

The findings are prioritized, and each one comes with a clear recommendation. It is delivered as a working document your team can act on, not a slide deck. The aim is that your leads can pick it up the next morning and start.

Some studios take the findings and run with them. Others want help with the changes, and the audit rolls into an embedded engagement through implementation. Either way, the map of the work stays with the team.

More on pipeline audits for AAA studios and game production consulting for indie studios.