The team is busy but not finishing work. What is happening?
Excess work in progressLook at unfinished work, interruptions, and handoff queues rather than individual busyness. Reduce simultaneous commitments and help the team finish valuable items before starting more.
What to do now
- Visualize all active work
- Identify blocked and aging items
- Limit new starts to available capacity
- Focus collaboratively on finishing priority items
When to escalate
Escalate when
Critical commitments are endangered by uncontrolled parallel work.
Who decides
The team lead and appropriate line manager
Example
The team pauses new starts while it completes three nearly finished deliverables awaiting review.
Mistake to avoid
Using utilization as the sole measure of team effectiveness.
Prevent a repeat
Review whether working agreements improve delivery and raise people concerns through the appropriate channels.
Suggested ApprovedFlow setup
- Tasks
- Resources
- Documents
Make agreed responsibilities and follow-up tasks visible while keeping sensitive people matters in the authorized confidential process. See the platform
Related cases
- Meetings leave no time for focused work. What can we remove?Coordination overload
- The project manager assigns every task in an agile team. Is that necessary?Overcentralized work coordination
- The vendor refuses to share progress evidence. What should we do?Unverifiable supplier delivery
- Different reports show different completion percentages. Which one is right?Inconsistent progress definitions