Can teams pull in more work during a sprint? - Mike Cohn
“Can we bring in more work if we’re ahead in a sprint?"
It’s one of the most common questions I get from Scrum teams — and honestly, for a long time, I couldn’t understand why. The answer felt obvious.
Of course you can bring in more work if you're ahead and clearly going to finish everything you committed to do. Just like you can drop work if you're behind.
A sprint plan is a forecast — a best guess at what the team thinks it can get done. It's not a contract. No one gets it perfect every time, and that’s OK.
But I kept hearing this question over and over, so I started asking why. Why does adding work spark so much hesitation — even fear?
Here's what I learned: Teams are afraid that starting something they can’t fully complete within the sprint is somehow breaking the rules, or even worse, a failure.
That fear leads teams to hesitate to pick up something new unless they’re 100 percent sure they can finish it before the sprint ends.
Let me reassure you. Being halfway done with one or two things at the end of a sprint isn’t a problem. Sometimes, it’s even desirable.
It only becomes a problem if a team is consistently halfway done with several things or worse, everything.
If the team is genuinely ahead, and they’ve completed what they committed to, they can absolutely pull in something new — even if they might not finish it.
Good agile teams always try to finish everything, just like good sports teams try to make every attempt on goal or get a hit at every at bat.
And when given the opportunity, great agile teams don’t hesitate to make progress on something new even if they might not finish.
What’s the real issue underneath the question?
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