Suggested Leadership Actions

Inspect

• Review your organization’s history of project outcomes. Does your organization’s experience match the general pattern that small projects are successful more often than large projects?

• Review your project portfolio. Which of your large projects could be broken into multiple small projects?

• Review your teams’ cadences. Are their sprints no more than 3 weeks long?

• Investigate whether your teams are delivering in vertical slices.

• Investigate whether your teams are using velocity-based planning.

• Interview your teams about technical debt. What is their perception about how much debt they’re carrying and whether they are allowed to pay it down?

Adapt

• Encourage your teams to consider their velocity when establishing their sprint goals.

• Develop a plan to ensure that your teams have the ability to deliver in vertical slices, including the Development Team’s design capability and the Product Owner’s approach to backlog refinement.

• Encourage your teams to create plans to manage their technical debt.