Get stuff done

What this means in practice

Teams organise around finishing valuable work, not maximising individual utilisation. Planning and ceremonies are designed to help stories reach “done” quickly, with the team collaborating to unblock delivery and keep flow moving.

Why this matters

If teams optimise for everyone being busy, work spreads thinly, gets stuck in progress, and takes longer to deliver. By optimising for finishing, teams reduce queues and handoffs, improve quality, and give stakeholders a more predictable path from idea to outcome.

Practices that meet this principle

• Task based estimates for sprint planning to ensure individuals are not overloaded

• Team swarming on tasks in a story to get complete

• Streams (i.e groups of people) allow for a team to split and work on parallel activities

• Limit work in progress and finish before starting to reduce context switching

• Story Huddles to provide a final agreement on readiness

• Walking the board in stand-ups, rather than walking the person

Validation

A piece of work meets this principle when:

• Sprint planning results in sustainable commitments, and individuals are not repeatedly overloaded

• Stories regularly reach “done” within the sprint (or an agreed timebox), rather than accumulating as partially-started work

• The team actively swarms to unblock delivery, rather than waiting for “their” task to be ready

• Work in progress is visibly limited, and new work is not pulled in until existing work is finished

• Stand-ups and story huddles focus on moving specific work items forward (walking the board), with clear next actions to remove blockers

• Parallel work is enabled through streams, without creating hidden dependencies or leaving too many items half-finished