Working towards Sustainable Pace in Scrum, SAFe and Kanban

Aiming towards Sustainable Pace

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” — The Agile Manifesto Principle

“programmers or software developers should not work more than 40 hour weeks, and if there is overtime one week, that the next week should not include more overtime.” — Extreme Programming

An unsustainable pace is unhealthy. It contributes to burnout, quality issues, and unpredictable results.

If you are an agile leader — do you know whether your teams are currently operating at a sustainable pace? Do you care? Would you rather not know because you’re afraid of the answer?

Measuring Sustainable Pace

Beyond having a general idea of the sustainability of pace, perhaps it would help to have a concrete KPI related to it?

If we use the language of OKRs, maybe something along these lines:

Objective Achieve a healthy sustainable pace KR1 — People working reasonable hours AMB (as measured by) hours per week KR2 — People happy about their pace AMB continuous survey KR3 — Plans don’t assume unsustainable pace AMB ability to achieve…