Buried in unplanned work, with no process to fix it.
A 6-person development team at a SaaS marketing services provider was working on a legacy .NET platform with no structured sprint process. The team had no baseline for capacity, no visibility into velocity, and was constantly buried in unplanned work.
Beyond the process gaps, deeper systemic issues compounded the problem:
Two phases: build the foundation, then go deeper.
The first priority was establishing a predictable sprint process. With that stable, the next phase tackled root causes:
Injection under control. Output growing.
Unplanned work was drowning the team. In the first two sprints, injected work exceeded what was planned — a sign that the process around the team was broken. A combination of product management reform and targeted bug fixes that eliminated faulty data at the source drove injection down dramatically.
In Sprints 1 and 2, injected work hit 145% and 142% of committed points — the process around the team was broken. By Sprint 5, injection had fallen to 19%. Bug fixes eliminated faulty data at the source, removing the need for constant data cleanup injections.
As the process matured and the team built confidence, sprint commitments grew from 29 points to 101 points in five sprints. This isn't the team working harder. It's the planning process accurately reflecting what the team can deliver — a 3.5× growth in capacity visibility.
With data cleanup work declining as root-cause fixes took hold, the team shifted toward product value. By Sprint 5, 62% of sprint work was feature development, up from 39% in Sprint 3.
Once the dev team was delivering predictably, the bottleneck shifted. 61 points of completed dev work sat in UAT with no one testing it. Some items had been waiting for validation for over 55 days. The dev team delivered the work. The organization hadn't validated it.
When you fix the dev team, you expose the constraints that were always there but hidden behind slower delivery.
UAT processes depend on business users carving out time from their day jobs to test. That worked when the dev team was delivering a trickle. It breaks when the team is delivering a flood.
The team didn't change. The people didn't change. The systems changed.
Capacity-based planning, right-sized stories, root-cause bug fixes, and true product management transformed the same team from no process to outpacing the rest of the organization. The next challenge is organizational: building UAT processes that can keep up with a high-performing dev team.