Our journey to complete a sprint #1

Finishing a sprint sounds easy, but we find it really difficult.

We have set ourselves a new goal to complete a sprint, as planned! Over the last year or so we have tried many things, but this time we have a new stealth tool on our side: Umano’s own automated feedback loop.

There are a several things we know that we could do better, but optimism get often in our way. We know that;

1. We will always have unforeseen work within a sprint (e.g. client demos, on-boarding of new teams and workshops )
2. Because we don’t finish the previous sprint, we roll-over work into the new sprint thinking that we are ‘almost’ finished and therefor have capacity
3. We often finish Sprint planning by saying that this Sprint will be different from the previous ones

We will start this journey by looking closely into our Consistency of Progress and Sufficiency of Progress. Consistency reflects our ability to work consistently each day. Sufficiency reflects whether we are on track to complete the planned sprint. We expect to see our consistency vary after implementing process changes. Each change we make will disrupt our rhythm at first. We can only measure the true impact of our new process changes once we are regain a consistent rhythm. We won’t have achieved our goal to complete a sprint until our improvements are repeatable.

Throughout this journey we will learn more about our own process and behaviours and share our learnings along the way.