Why Does Every Sprint Contain Unplanned Work?

🎁 A step-by-step template guide for Scrum Masters

Q: “Hi Vibhor, I’m supporting a Scrum Team where every Sprint gets disrupted by unplanned work. Sprint items are not carried over. New work keeps entering the Sprint from different sources. How can I help the team here?

Thank you for the question.

This is clearly an intake problem.

Let’s start by making one thing clear: We can’t (and shouldn’t) eliminate all unplanned work.

In many environments, production incidents, regulatory changes, security vulnerabilities, and critical customer issues are legitimate realities.

And therefore…

Our aim should be to make the “intake” of such work visible and governed by clear trade-off decisions.

As a Scrum Master, you can help your team.

How?

By investigating the system through which “such” work enters your Sprints.

Let’s walk through how to do this properly.

Let’s get started.

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