On Tuesday, we looked at a simple idea: a new Sprint does not erase the history of work already in progress.
So what can that history tell us?
Velocity shows how much estimated work a team completed in previous Sprints. Throughput counts the items completed over a period. Both tell us about finished work, but neither tells us how long a particular unfinished item has been in progress or has been waiting.
Continue reading What the age of unfinished work can tell usOne of the harder parts of being a Scrum Master is this: sometimes you can see that a team needs to slow down, but managers or stakeholders want the opposite.
That is understandable.
From the outside, slowing down can look like reduced effort.
But in practice, reducing overload is often how delivery improves.
The key is not to argue for ‘slowing down’ in the abstract.
It is to help people see that too much work in progress, too many competing priorities and too much pressure to start work are often the very things that stop work from finishing.
Continue reading How to influence when slowing down is the right moveOne of the most important agile lessons I have learned is that speed does not always come from going faster.
Sometimes it comes from slowing the system down.
I saw this in a Scrum team that was struggling to finish work. On paper, we looked reasonably disciplined. We were following Scrum well enough. We had two-week sprints, like other teams in the organisation. But our delivery told a different story.
When I checked the Jira data, our cycle time for backlog items ranged from one day to 35 days.
That meant some work was taking up to seven weeks to get through the system.
For a team working in two-week sprints, that was a warning sign.
Continue reading When slowing a team down increased deliveryAgile teams can fall into a trap that looks productive from the outside.
Everyone is busy.
Everyone has work.
Everyone is occupied all day.
But busyness is not flow.
Flow is not about making sure every person is fully utilised. It is about helping valuable work move through the system smoothly, with as little delay, friction and interruption as possible.
These are not the same thing.
Continue reading Busyness is not flow