delivery delays

The hidden life of agile work: follow one item through its waiting

Earlier this week, we looked at the gaps between active steps: the time when an item is ‘in progress’ but nobody is working on it.

To make those gaps visible, follow one item through its journey.

Start small.

Choose a recently completed piece of work and reconstruct what happened from the moment it started to the moment it finished.

An item can spend days ‘in progress’ while nobody is actively working on it.

Someone has started it. Everyone involved is busy. Yet the item is waiting for an answer, a review or its turn in somebody else’s queue.

If we want to understand why delivery takes so long, we need to notice the gaps between the work.

A Scrum team completes an Increment. What happens next?

If the answer includes, “It waits”, the team may have uncovered a wider problem in the delivery system.

Choose a recently completed Product Backlog item (PBI) and follow its journey beyond the team.

Where did it go after it met the Definition of Done?