Sustainable pace of work

Although widely used when we are close to a deadline, the intensive use of overtime and forced acceleration of the pace of work generate stress among the members of teams that develop a product, destroying motivation and quickly reducing their productivity, not to mention the quality of the product under development. Teams that use Scrum, on the other hand, seek a constant and sustainable pace in their product development work.

Aiming for this sustainability, Scrum seeks to bring a sustainable cadence to the work of teams. The development cycles for a product have a short, fixed, and regular duration, and the team has the authority to define how much work will be planned for each cycle. In this way, by working in cycles of the same duration, one after the other, and not putting pressure on the team to plan more work than it believes it can do, the team naturally tends to achieve a steady and sustainable pace.

Also, all meetings prescribed by Scrum have a maximum duration within which they should take place. These are the so-called timeboxes, which, when respected, can also help the team to create a work cadence and achieve this constant and sustainable pace. The planning meeting for each cycle is an example of a timebox. It shouldn’t be for longer than eight hours for cycles that last a month. The other Scrum meetings also have a defined maximum duration.

Even when the team nears the end of the established period and is certain it will not be able to realize the proposed goal, its timebox will not be extended. Likewise, dysfunctions such as overtime and forced acceleration of the work pace should be avoided. On the other hand, the scope is flexible, and the team can naturally reach the end of its timebox without having fulfilled the entire plan. The counterpart to this is that the team must work in the defined order, so that at the end, only the least important work remains.