One 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 delivery