The mosquito-control dashboard team is fully staffed but almost never finishes a slice because every story waits on outside GIS and security specialists. What should the SM/TC treat this as?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A fully staffed dashboard team that cannot finish is a truck with a full cab waiting on two borrowed wrenches. Headcount is not the bottleneck—the GIS and security wait is. High-performing teams redesign so they can complete work without living on outside specialists.
Full Explanation
Chronic waits on outside specialists are a team-design problem. A fully staffed mosquito-control dashboard team that almost never finishes because every story waits on external GIS and security specialists is dependency-blocked, not “fully utilized success.” The Scrum Master/Team Coach should treat this as excessive external dependency: pull needed skills into the team or redesign scope so waits shrink and public-health dashboards finish.
Starting even more stories while waiting fails by concept: it inflates WIP and worsens multitasking. Dropping Definition of Done until specialists catch up fails by concept by lowering quality to hide dependency. Calling a full roster success because utilization looks high fails by concept: busyness without finished slices is not high performance.
Exam caveat: SAFe cross-functional team design aims to minimize external waits for skills required to deliver value; standing armies that still cannot finish are a design smell. Embedding, pairing, or adjusting team boundaries are preferred over endless ticket queues to shared services.
Operational check: map dependency wait time on GIS/security for dashboard stories, secure embedded capacity or training inside the team, reduce in-progress items waiting externally, and confirm finished slices rise.