When you work in a large company, one of the things you hear quite often is “we have to follow the process”. Large companies, for very good reasons, have a need to standardise their processes. If you have 50,000 staff, having one way to do things makes a lot of sense. No matter where someone goes in the organisation, the process for ordering a new pen, or whatever, will be the same. The problem with defined processes though, is that unless they are regularly reviewed and cleaned up, they tend to accumulate complexity. Each time something happens that is just outside the normal way the process works, someone will add some extra checks into the process to make sure that that situation is now covered. Over the years it will collect enough of these extra checks that your carefully considered and streamlined pen ordering process now requires a 10 page form, 15 signatures and about 4 hours (and in some companies a pint of cockerel’s blood). The end result is that everyone spends all day looking for pens.

When a team is behind its targets, the natural instinct is to work even harder to catch up. Sometimes though, the best thing you can do is… nothing.

Let’s look at a team. For various reasons, they have done several sprints' worth of work with no test environment available. How can this be? Let’s just imagine that they work for a hypothetical large company with a ludicrously complex process around setting up test environments. I’m sure such things never happen in real life, but just go with me on this one.