The ideal is to make a change and see that change deployed to production, in a perfect world we would be told to work on something, write the code + tests, deploy to a test environment, prove it works and deploy - this is the cycle time and the faster you can get this the easier many things become.

The cycle time is easy to measure - it is the time the ticket arrives in the backlog to the time it moves to the done column, if your issue tracking system can’t tell you this easily then use something else!