The permits portal team's legal-review column is always full, yet developers keep pulling new intake stories. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach the team to do?

In Theory of Constraints terms that SAFe flow coaching uses, throughput is governed by the constrained step. On the permits portal team, a perpetually full legal-review column while developers keep starting intake work means the system is flooding the bottleneck. The Scrum Master/Team Coach should name legal review as the constraint and stop pushing more work upstream until that step can finish—exactly like pausing new folders at a jammed city permit window so clerks can clear the counter that actually serves residents.

Starting more intake so legal review never starves fails by concept: overfeeding a bottleneck grows queues, lengthens flow time, and burns developer energy on work that cannot complete. Hiding the legal-review column fails by concept because it optimizes appearances for leadership while destroying visibility of the public-service delay. Raising the legal-review WIP limit until the pile is officially allowed fails by concept: it legitimizes overload instead of protecting flow through the constraint.

Exam caveat: identifying a bottleneck is not the same as permanently idling the whole ART; the coaching move is to subordinate non-bottleneck starts to the constrained step’s capacity, then improve the bottleneck. Multi-tasking around the constraint usually worsens flow time for citizen-facing permit work.

Operational check: make legal-review WIP and aging visible on the board, halt new intake pulls until legal WIP is within an agreed limit, pair with legal stakeholders on smaller review batches, and re-measure flow time for stories that exit legal review after the policy change.