5 Reasons Most Scrum Teams Struggle with Completing their Sprint Load?

One of the major concerns for many scrum teams is to ensure that their teams are productive, and they can deliver an increment at the end of every sprint. However, they need to stay productive and to meet their goal at the end of the sprint has also caused many teams to get into high technical debt. On the other hand, most scrum teams are faced with problems of whether it is imperative to complete the work they commit to before the end of the sprint.? To address this challenge appropriately, we must understand some of the challenges that hinders a scrum team performance.? Below are some of the possible reasons a scrum team might not be able to complete the work they committed to prior to closing their sprint:

Not Understanding Dependencies

One of the major problems any scrum team faces is the fact that they do not pay attention to appropriately mapping out dependencies that would occur within the team and in relation to other teams. Most often they only get to realize this when they start working on a story. This becomes an impediment that may take several days or hours to fix. The inability to identify the dependencies of stories could be a major blocker to the team's progress. It is advisable to always have as a point on the agenda during your backlog refinement and the sprint planning to check the level of dependency amongst the sprint backlog items and how they can be coordinated to minimize the risk of story roll-over to the next sprint.?

Inadequate Technical Skills

Technical skills have a very big role to play when it comes to completing work on time. One of the major reasons a scrum team is recommended to be cross functional is to ensure that the wait time needed to find extra support out of the team is reduced. One of the common problems a scrum team will struggle with it velocity is often linked to the fact that they need to depend on external resources to perform testing or specific tasks. This is a major blocker because the story they are working on cannot be closed until they receive feedback from the external team member. Given that they most often don't have control over the environment of the external team, it becomes challenging to complete work on time.?

Poorly Developed User Stories

For a team to know exactly what effort is needed to complete a story, that story needs to be word developed in terms of the descriptions and the user story, outlining all the different test cases that need to be completed before the story is done. However, most product owners and developers do not pay attention to this, and often assume they know what it will take to complete the work. In most of the cases they would often find out that the amount of effort needed is beyond the assumed estimation. It is very important to fully write in detail the descriptions and acceptance criteria for every story in the product backlog.?

Inadequate of Communication and Collaboration

It is often said that teamwork beats every work. This is because a team is more effective than the same number of individuals. However, we must understand that what makes a team is not the fact that they are together, but that they possess attributes, including communication and collaboration, that enabled them to function as a whole. The reason a scrum implement events to help the scrum team complete work is to facilitate an environment where communication and collaboration can prevail. When a scrum team doesn't pay attention to the importance of communication and collaboration, it will spend more time in meetings arguing about things that do not really add value. Effective communication and collaboration should take place beyond the time box of team events. Team members should be encouraged to sustain communication and collaboration offline.?

Poor alignment of teams

In an environment where multiple teams are working on the same product, there is an urgent need to ensure that all teams are aligned to the common vision. However, most environments practicing scrum with multiple teams do not pay attention to how everyone contributing to the product is aligned to the common vision. While coaching scrum teams one of the things you pay particular attention to is to understand how team level work is linked to the product vision and road map, and how it connects to other teams working on the same product. When this alignment is missing, it would be very difficult to trace any impediment that might arise after the increment has been deployed or released.

How can scrum master support a team to improve its velocity?

As a scrum master, your ability to understand the above-mentioned challenges gives you an upper hand to know exactly what to do if a team is facing challenges with completing work prior to closing the sprint. My first recommendation for scrum masters joining a new team is for them to ensure that they understand the product a team is working on. These include understanding the product vision, the road map, and the release plan.? If you are supporting a team as a scrum master and you do not have a clear understanding of how they work at a team level aligns with the work at the program and portfolio level, it would be difficult for you to ensure the team is building quality in the process and product.?

On the other hand, the scrum master needs the support of leadership to effectively implement agile product delivery. One of the ways to gain support from leadership is to constantly showcase the performance of your team and taking time to illustrate to leadership how information program and portfolio level can support you to solve this problem. As a scrum master, you must also acknowledge that scrum is a learning process and every environment should be evaluated independently and performance metrics adapted to support product implementation as per the result of that environment.