Improving Flow

SASM · 69 questions

• The 311 citizen-request intake team sees tickets arrive in bursts after storms, making two-week iteration planning feel like theater. What method choice should the SM/TC consider?
• A new permits-plan-review feature team has a relatively stable Feature backlog and benefits from iteration goals, but a director says they should “upgrade” to Kanban because it is more advanced. What should the SM/TC coach?
• The wastewater System Team wants to abandon the ART iteration cadence because they chose Kanban. What should the SM/TC remind them?
• Food-safety inspection leadership mandates that every team must be Scrum, including the after-hours on-call ops group. How should the SM/TC respond?
• A library interlibrary-loan support team has priorities that change daily. What planning implication should the SM/TC highlight?
• Hardware signal-shop staff on the traffic-signal timing ART think choosing Kanban means they no longer write Team PI Objectives. What should the SM/TC coach?
• The paratransit-scheduling team wants to keep Scrum events and add a Kanban board. How should the SM/TC treat that mix?
• A grants-management business team that does not write software is told they “cannot be Agile.” What should the SM/TC explain?
• The emergency-shelter coordinated-entry team flips methods every iteration because a consultant likes novelty. What should the SM/TC coach?
• Lead-service-line inventory field crews have the skills to deliver a slice of value but are organized as a component “GIS-only” group. What should the SM/TC address before celebrating a method choice?
• The FOIA public-records team copies a vendor Kanban board with 14 columns before mapping their real workflow. What should the SM/TC coach them to do first?
• Court e-filing developers want Scrum because they like Sprint Goals, while records clerks on the same labeled “team” want Kanban. What should the SM/TC check first?
• Snow-desk operators fear that choosing Kanban means they can never say no to new requests. What should the SM/TC include in the method?
• The vital-records team is high-performing in Scrum, and a director wants Kanban “because SASM said Kanban is advanced.” What should the SM/TC recommend?
• A municipal-fiber operations team spends most of its capacity on interrupt-driven outage tickets, with only a small enhancement backlog. Leadership still wants every ticket committed as a Scrum story at Iteration Planning. What should the SM/TC coach?
• After choosing SAFe Team Kanban, parks volunteer-management staff ask to skip System Demo because Kanban teams do not demo on a cadence. What should the SM/TC do?
• The animal-shelter licensing team asks the SM/TC to just pick Scrum or Kanban so they can start. How should the SM/TC respond?
• After choosing SAFe Scrum, the bridge-load-rating team still holds every story in a two-month analysis queue before it is called ready. A director says they picked the wrong method. What should the SM/TC emphasize?
• The pothole-311 crew’s work lives in individual inboxes, so nobody can see wait time or how much is in progress. What should the SM/TC start with?
• A permit-inspection team’s board shows only Doing and Done, so legal-review wait never appears. What change should the SM/TC coach?
• Water-meter replacement tickets keep piling in In Progress with no WIP limit. What should the SM/TC introduce first?
• The elections-canvass support board shows WIP limits, but the team pulls past them whenever a new ticket arrives. What should the SM/TC focus on?
• Blocked hydrant-mapping stories sit in Dev as if they were still moving. What should the SM/TC coach the team to do?
• The library hotspot-lending team visualizes only developer tasks, so wait for Product Owner clarification never appears. What should the SM/TC include on the board?
• Storm-debris contractors are tracked on a private spreadsheet the rest of the debris-management team cannot see. What should the SM/TC prefer?
• A zoning-plan-check board lists each reviewer as a column and parks tickets under names. What should the SM/TC redirect the team to visualize?
• The 911-radio-upgrade team copies the ART program board and uses it as their only team board. What distinction should the SM/TC draw?
• Food-pantry eligibility stories jump from Ready to Done whenever staff say they already know, skipping verification columns. What should the SM/TC do with the board?
• Transit-fare testers cannot tell which stories are ready to pull from Dev. What should the SM/TC add?
• After visualizing its workflow, the child-care-license team discovers a giant waiting-on-state-interface queue. Leadership wants a new vendor this week. What is the SM/TC’s first coaching point?
• Parks field-lighting work is on a team board, but expedite stickers cover half the cards. What should the SM/TC coach about classes of service?
• The treasurer tax-payment team wants a polished electronic board before anyone can name the workflow steps. What should the SM/TC prefer?
• Warming-center operations hide after-hours incidents off the board so metrics look good. What should the SM/TC insist on?
• A sidewalk-cafe permit team visualizes only new features and never puts defects or risk work on the board. What should the SM/TC include?
• The civic-broadband install team updates its board only at Friday status. What should the SM/TC want the board to become?
• Housing-maintenance leadership asks how fast the team is and hears only story-point velocity. What measure should the SM/TC introduce for a permit-to-fix slice?
• The clinic-scheduling team starts more work than it finishes each iteration. Which flow signal should the SM/TC use first?
• Street-sweeping route software finishes lots of tiny chores and almost no resident-facing slices. Leadership still hears that the team was busy. What should the SM/TC use?
• A DMV-appointment team’s active time on a request is 4 hours inside a 20-day wait. Which measure should the SM/TC use to make that contrast visible?
• Election-night reporting throughput on a civic results team is high one week and drops to zero the next. Leadership wants to treat the spike as the team's true speed. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach emphasize?
• 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?
• School-bus-routing stories sit in a huge ready pile, and flow time keeps growing. The Product Owner wants bigger estimates to cover the wait. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach?
• A flood-alert messaging team batches every change into a monthly release to be efficient. Residents only learn about mistakes after the batch ships. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach recommend?
• Vital-records stories ping-pong among a clerk, a developer, and a state vendor, stalling for days at each handoff. How should the Scrum Master/Team Coach improve flow?
• Restaurant-score pages are shown to health officers only after a quarterly review, so the civic app team learns about defects late. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach push for?
• Developers on the GIS-parcel viewer context-switch across five priority-one items, and nothing finishes. What flow coaching should the Scrum Master/Team Coach apply?
• A legacy change-advisory board must approve every 311-text tweak, so small civic-app copy changes sit for weeks. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach do?
• Parks tee-time software leadership measures only individual utilization and wants every developer busy. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach redirect them toward?
• After the solar-permitting team adds WIP limits, throughput dips for several days while wait time starts dropping. A manager calls the experiment a failure. How should the Scrum Master/Team Coach interpret the dip?
• The air-quality-sensor team tracks flow metrics nobody reviews, and the board never changes. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach do with those measures?
• A director wants a single green/red flow score for the jail-visitation scheduling team. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach prefer?
• Community-garden plot software shows excellent cycle time on tiny chores and terrible time on resident-facing features. Average cycle time still makes the team look fast. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach use?
• Certificate-of-occupancy defects are found only in a city-wide UAT week, and rework then blocks the team's flow. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach?
• The benefits portal team skips automated tests to go faster and then drowns in production patches. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach link to flow?
• Only one specialist can change the parking-meter firmware, so every firmware story waits on that person. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach?
• Stormwater models accumulate hacks because the team says there is no time to refactor, and each new change takes longer. How should the Scrum Master/Team Coach treat refactoring?
• The immunization-registry team has no Definition of Done, so stories marked done fail System Demo and stall the ART. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach?
• Plan-review comments on a civic permitting workflow are written only after code is called complete, causing late rework. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach the team to do?
• A civic 311-app team integrates once per PI, and each merge becomes a multi-day firefight. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach as a flow practice?
• Election-map styling is tested by one clerk on a laptop the night before go-live. What quality-for-flow approach should the Scrum Master/Team Coach want instead?
• Public-comment docket software meets WCAG only if a specialist audits at the end of the PI, which then stalls release. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach?
• The water-quality-report team treats built-in quality as the QA person's job, so developers throw work over the wall. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach coach toward?
• A vendor library used by the property-appraisal site has no tests, and every upgrade freezes the team. How should the Scrum Master/Team Coach treat that risk?
• Food-inspection mobile app crashes are discovered only when field staff call the help desk. What should the Scrum Master/Team Coach establish?
• Directors on the housing-voucher ART schedule a dedicated hardening iteration at the end of every PI so testers can hunt defects after feature work. What should the Scrum Master / Team Coach do?
• The trails-counter team pairs only when there is extra time, and a review queue piles up at the end of every iteration. What should the SM/TC coach?
• The court-payment team demos every story against mocked payment-gateway and docket integrations, then marks the increment Done. ART System Demo later fails on the real interfaces. What should the SM/TC insist on?
• A records-retention team recodes production defects as new feature stories so velocity stays pretty. What should the SM/TC do?
• After the business-license team adds test automation, flow time drops because fewer items bounce back from verify. Leadership still asks for a count of tools purchased. How should the SM/TC justify the quality investment?