7 Wastes Killing Your Scrum Team’s Flow—How to Spot and Squash Them

Scrum Masters: This is your role, your job, your purpose.

I walked away from my first day with a new client feeling deflated.

I’ve seen the same pattern time and time again in twenty teams over the last four years. I thought, “How has Scrum become what it aimed to fix?” In fact, Scrum has become worse than what came before it.

Scrum, in many cases, has become an extra, painful overhead on top of conventional, predictive, command-and-control methods. It’s a freaking mess out there.

• Producing piles of features no user needs.
• Commitments and rigid plans drown out adaptation.
• Siloed ownership and hand-offs create drag and stall value.
• A culture of keeping specialists busy with no connection to value.
• Collections of individuals, working alone, masquerading as a team.

I despise a stale, old-school way of working. All I can see everywhere I look is waste.

I can’t help it. Wasteful activity glows like neon at night to me.

I’ve been developing software since I was 13, and I’m not that young anymore. My journey has shown me the ups and downs of what makes a team exceptional and what destroys it. I’ve seen it all.

Over the years, I’ve developed “eyes for waste” as Jeffrey Liker coined the phrase in The Toyota Way. I’m able to see smoke and extinguish it before it becomes a raging fire of problems. This skill is sorely missing in today’s Scrum Masters.

I recently wrote an article on how Scrum Masters can get back to form, and I received a ton of questions about how to spot waste.

One thing is clear. Today’s Scrum Masters care about improving the system of work. But they need some guidance. Lean flow is not a crucial part of any Scrum Master certification.

Scrum Masters today find they must rely on their own initiative to try to keep their head above water. They aren’t equipped with a “waste radar” and the countermeasures to battle what sucks the life out of teams.

Scrum Masters today need better knowledge of what kills flow.

So, I am writing down what I’ve learned to give Scrum Masters a boost. To give them “eyes for waste.”

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Seven Wastes Every Scrum Master Should Hunt Down and Squash

To kill a waste, you have to be able to spot it.

A good litmus test is to see what is making work pause. When your work is waiting and not flowing toward a solution that meets your user’s needs, waste is lurking.

Work with no movement has no value and can earn no value.

Idle work is a good start, but insufficient if you want to hunt down waste.

If you are going to get good at spotting waste, you have to go deeper. But the many versions of the lean wastes floating around on the internet make it challenging to find a definitive list.

So, I’ve curated my favorites based on my experiences. I’ve got 7 wastes every Scrum Master should practice identifying and eliminating. I’ll also provide common antidotes you can try.

Knowing how to spot waste and squash it fast will give meaning to the “Master” in the name of your role.

Let’s jump in, shall we?

Waste 1: Hand-offs stall value and cause blaming.

Hand-offs are insidious waste generators.

I list hand-offs first and in more detail as they spawn every other lean waste.

You will recognize the waste of hand-offs because of all the waiting and blaming going around. It’s never your fault the work gets delayed. It’s their fault.

If your team can’t own its work end-to-end, you suffer the waste of hand-offs. Here are common examples:

• Pull requests for approval.
• Approval boards and gates.
• Testing performed by a separate QA team.
• Decisions made by managers or those in authority.
• A separate layer team (e.g., front-end, database, or services).
• Writing stories in a backlog and handing them off to the team.
• Specifications crafted by architects or designers not on the team.
• Discovery with users and stakeholders performed without the team.

Any of those sound familiar? I bet they do based on what I’ve seen lately.

When a team depends on others outside itself, the team is incomplete. In a way, it’s crippled.

How do I fix hand-offs?

I break the dependency chain and bring control to the team or to individuals on the team. The key is in having the ability to do any task necessary to flow value.

Breaking a dependency often requires you to gain a skill if it’s missing. Sometimes, it is as simple as getting permission. Other times, you may have to dismantle traditional silos.

Here are some ways I do this:

• Form porous boundaries between teams.
• Give more authority to the team to decide.
• Automate compliance and security checks.
• Teach the team how to do the dependent item.
• Build collective ownership over individual ownership.
• Put the right folks in the same space and time to collaborate.

I aim for my teams to depend on no one to gain control over their flow of value. You should too.

Here’s the catch. Dependencies aren’t only outside your team. Hand-offs can also emerge within the team boundary. And they are just as deadly, as outlined in waste 2.

Waste 2: Knowledge scatter and relearning make your team weaker and slower.

Do you have a team or a collection of individuals?

If your teammates work solo on separate tasks and only talk during the Daily Scrum, you don’t have a team. Without collaboration, the team mind can’t form. Knowledge fractures and gets stuck in each team member’s head.

A team that doesn’t work together doesn’t learn together.

Think about it.

Learning happens in the moment. It gets baked into the next action you take when you work alone. In the Daily, you give your update that you finished your task. The learning stays with you.

The spotlight is on task status, not learning, with solo work.

Teams that don’t have shared learning have a slower flow of value.

Most work must pass through many team members’ hands to get completed.

Each member in the chain has to relearn what came before the hand-off arrives. Not knowing the intricacies of the prior decisions, each member makes assumptions (guesses).

Sometimes they guess right, but often, they don’t.

And since everyone works alone, they finish their part and hand it off again.

They pass their mistakes (unknowingly) downstream. This quality atrophy continues until it finally rears its head. Unwinding this tangled web of errors is painful and time-consuming. And you better hope your entire team is healthy. One member taking a sick day can stall progress as knowledge rests with individuals.

Value flow. Grinds. To. A. Halt.

This is a common failure pattern of today’s Scrum Teams.

And it has only become worse with remote work. Solo work is now the overwhelming preference. Who can blame today’s team members for wanting to escape endless Zoom meetings?

Are we witnessing the death of the team?

I don’t think we have to.

But it requires a return to focused collaboration.

I’ll explain how I do this soon.

First, we must discuss the sister waste of relearning and knowledge scatter—multitasking. The solution for all three is the same.

Waste 3: Multitasking and unfinished work create sluggish flow.

Staying busy leads to unfinished potential value.

We spoke above of the preference for solo work in today’s teams. And how it leads to knowledge scatter and relearning. It also creates piles of partially done work.

When you work solo, you tend to specialize in what you do best. You can’t rely on others when you work alone, so you choose to do what you know. And this means you try to stay busy doing that. You crank out your work, and it piles up waiting for your teammates to pick it up.

Being busy like this feels productive, but it’s ineffective in flowing value.

Value sits idle while you whir away like a machine.

And your teammates are doing the same. If you need them, or they need you, you are all too busy with other tasks to stop and help. Often you have to wait, or you make others wait. Value waits too.

But sometimes you stop or others stop and help you. When this happens, so does the context-switching cost. A context switch adds effort and time to the work to offload one task and orient to the next. And you tend to make errors. If you jump back and forth between many tasks, you could waste the majority of your time switching. Value collects dust as you do.

Busy specialists are a clear signal your value is being held hostage.

Starting many things at once delays finishing. When work isn’t finished, users can’t use it. When it can’t be used, its value is zero.

Staying busy and working solo is not effective.

Here’s my formula for focused collaboration (teamwork). It fixes knowledge scatter, relearning, multitasking, and unfinished work.

Focus requires a target and teamwork.

I do this with my 1-1-1+1 Framework. It provides a quick fix to collaboration and focus woes. Here it is:

• 1 Team: Each member is fully dedicated to only one team.
• 1 Goal: A single, clear, measurable target outcome for the team.
• 1 Item: The team completes one valuable customer solution at a time.
• +1 Task: If you dare, the team has one task per item in focus at a time.

Boom! Instant effectiveness at a steady, relaxed, sustainable pace.

• No knowledge scatter. The team learns from each other as they go.
• No relearning. You don’t have to relearn because you are there.
• No multitasking. Everyone focuses on the same thing at the same time in the same place (virtual or in-person). Context switching evaporates.
• No unfinished work. The team finishes each valuable work item together and moves to the next item together.

It’s remarkable. One change like this has such an impact on increasing value flow.

Waste 4: The mere presence of defects is wasteful.

Most of us know defects are bad.

But do you know that the way you work has a big effect on them? The way you respond to defects predicts your future defect potential.

Here are some ways of working that lead to more defects:

• Infrequent testing.
• Separate quality teams.
• Quality checks at the end.
• Detection without prevention.
• Large batches of unfinished work.
• Late integration of individual parts.
• Hand-offs to quality team members.
• Localized testing without full regression.
• Not fixing defects as soon as they appear.
• Prioritization of defects instead of fixing them.
• Support teams are separate from delivery teams.

See any that hit home? I bet you do. I see these in action all the time.

I joined a team once that had 2000 defects to fix before launch. Don’t be this team.

The fix to your defect woes.

Treat quality as a priority one, first-class action.

When you find a defect, stop and fix it. Don’t prioritize it. Don’t estimate it. Don’t send it to the backlog. Drop what you are doing and fix it. Full stop.

Piles of defects attract more to the pile. Don’t let them pile up.

And put testing first.

1. Work in small steps with your teammates.
2. Write (and automate) the test as a team before taking the step.
3. Take the step.
4. Inspect the result.
5. Iterate and retake the step until you get the correct result (a passing test).

Testing is everyone’s job. And so is quality. Make it so.

Waste 5: Over-production solves problems nobody has.

Many stakeholders worry about the wrong thing.

They expect the team to deliver the perfect version of every idea on time and within budget.

This has several flaws.

• Most upfront ideas suck at solving user needs.
• Users don’t need the best version you can imagine.
• Our perfect solutions try to solve every eventuality, not one immediate need.

It is rare to stop and think about the user. Amazing, I know. But this is true.

This is a feature factory. And it’s in full production output mode.

As a result, most Scrum Teams are backlog junkies. They don’t know their users. And they barely know their stakeholders. Today’s Scrum Teams are order takers, plain and simple.

Building more than what your users need today is a wasted effort.

Think of all the waste. We prioritize, plan, design, build, test, deploy, and maintain that which is not needed. And we lose customers and users as we squander our time, effort, and money.

I was on a team once that spent two years building a cutting-edge system that launched to an empty stadium. Nobody cared about our masterpiece. Don’t make the mistake I did.

The best thing we can imagine is often not what our users need in the time they need it.

Our users need much less than we think.

How I avoid producing more than my users need.

Throw your grand ideas to the curb.

Great products rarely result from feeding an insatiable ego.

Building a product without your user is more foolish than gambling; you have worse odds.

You have to know your users.

Don’t get your knowledge about users from someone else. You have to actually know them. Talk to them. Understand them.

Put users at the center, not your ego.

It doesn’t hurt to think big, but you must act and start small.

1. Get to know your users and their pain.
2. Start with a simple, modest solution.
3. See if it works and understand where it falls short.
4. Enhance until your users love it, and it works for your business.
5. Then, stop, even if short of your initial grand vision.

This is the lean approach to deliver solutions without excess that earn value sooner.

It’s how you capture and harvest early value and not produce things nobody needs.

Waste 6: Over-processing wears you out and slows you down.

Question every process step you take.

• Documentation that is never used or updated.
• Doing things because you’ve always done them.
• Coordinating that which your teams should own.
• Repetitive, manual actions that you could automate.
• Review boards without connection to the actual work.
• Hand-offs to teams for tasks your team could perform.
• Decisions by a centralized command, far removed from the action.

I’ve never met a process that was beyond improvement.

Many think I’m foolish to believe the best process is no process. But I am always striving to see how little process I can get away with.

Process gets in the way of greatness. We can let it get out of control and become the focus. This is why AI is so appealing. It tends to short-circuit all the normal patterns of operation. It has all the attractiveness of a shortcut. An easy button.

But even AI is a far cry from working with complete autonomy. It still requires us to interpret and use judgment.

Until Artificial General Intelligence arrives, we will need to streamline our processes ourselves.

The best ways I’ve found to simplify process.

I tend to take continuous incremental improvement to the extreme.

Every action I take, I inspect and adapt. And I expect those I interact with to do the same. Here are some ways I do this:

• If I have repeated a process more than once, I try to automate it.
• Collaboration blocks include frequent pause and reflect moments.
• If I have to get approvals, I learn the rules and automate the checks.
• Every meeting ends in a retrospective on how to run it better next time.
• Daily reflection and planning for the next day (including improvements).

I practice this with my Scrum Teams.

The whole team treats the process as something to cut through improvement. And before long, the process simplifies and goes into the background.

Less process gives you more time to focus on flowing value.

Waste 7: Wishful thinking eventually bites you.

Hope has led many a team to fail.

Here is the general pattern I see in 99% of the teams when I start working with them:

1. Stakeholders, desiring to motivate urgency, set a deadline.
2. The Team doesn’t want to look weak, so it agrees to the deadline.
3. Things don’t go as planned. The team becomes scared to say anything.
4. Afraid to reveal bad news, the team paints a rosy picture to stakeholders.
5. The team works nights and weekends to try (in vain) to pull things off.
6. When failure is imminent, corners get cut (usually quality).
7. The team meets the deadline with a pathetic shadow of the initial vision.

As you can see, wishful thinking starts in step 1 and continues until the end. And when the truth finally emerges, time, money, and energy are gone.

Betting on hope amidst high upfront complexity and uncertainty is like wishing on a star. This kills transparency and destroys trust.

And few products survive it.

How I avoid betting on hope.

Deadlines don’t motivate excellence. They breed mediocre results.

But timeliness is important. We need a better way to answer the question, “When will it be done?”

So, here is how the savvy Scrum Master responds:

“I don’t know. But if we can start with a small experiment, I will know more. And I will continue to know more about duration as we continue to take small steps and learn from them.”

Smart Scrum Masters ask for a chance to start and gain knowledge. Evidence and learning help you navigate the darkness.

The shortest path to your desired product outcome isn’t straight.

It’s crooked.

It goes around.

It goes in circles.

It goes backward.

It goes the long way.

Be ready for this. Admit you don’t know the right way before starting. Nobody has a crystal ball in product work. And anyone who claims they do is an amateur.

They don’t set deadlines upfront with no knowledge.

And they don’t bet on hope.

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That’s it. Those are the seven wastes you need to learn like the back of your hand.

As you are reading the seven, I bet your wheels are spinning.

You probably notice these behaviors in your teams. How many do you notice? All of them? Maybe you felt they were a problem all along, and now this validates your suspicions.

Whatever you feel, I’m sure you are fired up to start wiping them out. Where should you start? I’m glad you asked.

Meet with your team and assess where you have the most waste. Start there. Rally around it with your team. Ask for help where you don’t have the power to change it.

This is but a start to make Scrum palatable. But it’s your job, Scrum Master, to remove obstacles for your team. Waste is a great place to start.

Your teams will feel the freedom.

Your users will love the timely value.

Your stakeholders will stop worrying about setting deadlines.

And you will prove your worth in gold.

Remember, a Scrum Master is not just a facilitator. The best are waste eliminators. Master spotting and removal of these seven wastes, and you’ll propel your team to breakthrough results. Good luck out there.

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