I was in one of my Moose Herd (virtual Lean Coffee, coaching group/guild) meetings the other day and one of the folks asked a question about a team member they were coaching. I’ll try my best to capture it—
I have a team that I’m coaching who suffers from lots of WIP and they carry over between 30% and 40% of their stories per sprint. I’ve tried bringing up various ideas to help with this, but the team lead, a very strong character, always disagrees with any of my suggestions/ideas. They simply override me and consider it a non-problem. What coaching ideas do you have to change this?
The Herd group brought up quite a few suggestions, for example:
Better backlog grooming
Smaller stories
Discussion around WIP, Lean, and the importance of getting things done
Impact on forecasting and stakeholder trust
Talking to the persons manager
Perhaps trying Kanban, etc.
Everything we said the coach basically replied: Done that, tried that, didn’t work, give me something else…