video

Stop Starting and Start Finishing: The Key to Team Success

Published on
5 minute read

In today’s fast-paced business environment, there’s often a misconception that the more tasks we juggle, the more productive we are. However, as many successful teams have realized, this couldn’t be further from the truth. A popular quote from Lean methodology sums it up perfectly: “Stop starting and start finishing.” This philosophy emphasizes the importance of focusing on completing work, rather than constantly starting new tasks.

In this blog post, we’ll explore why this mindset is critical for Scrum teams and how implementing it can significantly improve efficiency, productivity, and overall business value.

The Cost of Multitasking: A Cognitive Drain

More Work ≠ More Productivity

A common fallacy is that the more work we have in progress, the more productive we are. This mindset is particularly prevalent in teams where members are often juggling multiple tasks at once. However, this approach leads to reduced efficiency and an increase in context switching—the mental effort required to shift from one task to another.

As explained by Gerald Weinberg in his book Systems Thinking, each additional task or project underway causes about a 20% loss in productivity. For example:

  • Two tasks = 20% productivity loss

  • Three tasks = 40% productivity loss

This loss occurs because our brains waste cognitive energy switching between tasks rather than focusing on solving core problems.

Key takeaway: The more tasks you’re juggling, the less effective you become at completing any of them.

The Impact of Context Switching

When you’re juggling too many tasks, your brain is constantly context switching. Instead of focusing on the problem at hand—one that could add significant value to the business—your mind is preoccupied with managing multiple priorities.

For instance, how often have you found yourself in the shower thinking, “How do I balance these three projects and keep all stakeholders happy?” When you’re stuck in this loop, you’re not solving problems that directly benefit your business. Instead, you’re merely trying to keep multiple balls in the air, and that’s not where the real value lies.

👉 Pro Tip: Focus on finishing a single project to completion before jumping to the next one. Your business cares about outcomes, not how many tasks you’re managing at once!

The Role of Leadership in Pushing Multiple Priorities

While it may seem like leadership is always pushing for more work to be completed simultaneously, it’s often middle management that applies this pressure. Middle managers, who are accountable for team performance, sometimes mistakenly believe that more tasks underway means more progress is being made.

However, this approach often results in:

  • Burnout among team members

  • Inefficiency due to context switching

  • Slower delivery times as tasks pile up without being completed

In Scrum, one of the core principles is to have a single Product Owner who prioritizes the backlog and funnels the work. This singular focus ensures that teams aren’t overwhelmed by conflicting demands from various stakeholders.

Scrum and Lean: Aligning for Maximum Efficiency

The Single Product Owner

In Scrum, the Product Owner acts as a funnel to manage competing priorities and ensure the team focuses on delivering value. This role is critical for avoiding the chaos of multitasking and allowing the team to focus on one project or task at a time.

While Lean doesn’t necessarily assign this role to an individual, it does advocate for a definition of workflow that limits work in progress (WIP). By clearly defining how much work a team can handle at any given time, Lean practices also help teams focus on finishing tasks rather than constantly starting new ones.

Limiting Work in Progress (WIP)

Both Scrum and Lean methodologies emphasize the importance of limiting WIP. When teams attempt to do too many things at once, they inadvertently extend their cycle time—the total time it takes from starting a task to finishing it.

One way to visualize this is through a Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD), which shows the difference between the amount of work started and the amount of work finished. When the gap between these two lines grows, it’s a clear indicator that too much work is being started and not enough is being completed.

👉 Pro Tip: Regularly review your team’s CFD to ensure that the gap between work started and work finished remains narrow. This helps maintain shorter cycle times and ensures that business value is delivered faster.

How to Prioritize Effectively

Focus on Value, Not Age

A common mistake teams make is prioritizing tasks based on how long they’ve been sitting in the backlog. While this might seem like a fair approach, it’s not necessarily the best for delivering business value. Instead, focus on value-based prioritization—picking the tasks that will deliver the most value to the business and completing them first.

When teams focus on value, they can:

  • Deliver high-impact features quickly

  • Maximize business ROI

  • Shorten cycle times, leading to quicker wins and a more predictable delivery schedule

Stop Starting, Start Finishing: Why It Matters

At the end of the day, the key to high-performing teams is simple: stop starting work and start finishing it. When teams focus on finishing tasks, they can reduce cycle times, improve throughput, and deliver more value to the business in a shorter amount of time.

Benefits of Finishing Work Before Starting New Tasks:

  • Increased productivity by reducing context switching

  • Faster delivery times for business-critical features

  • Greater focus on delivering value to the business

  • Predictability in delivery timelines, giving stakeholders confidence in the team

How to Implement This Mindset:

  • Limit WIP: Only allow a set number of tasks to be in progress at any given time.

  • Focus on value-based prioritization: Pick tasks that deliver the highest value to the business and complete them before starting new ones.

  • Monitor cycle times: Use tools like Cumulative Flow Diagrams to ensure that work is being finished at a steady pace.

Conclusion

The principle of stop starting and start finishing isn’t just a Lean idea—it’s a universal truth that applies to all teams, whether they’re practicing Scrum, Lean, or another framework. By focusing on finishing work before starting new tasks, teams can avoid the cognitive drain of multitasking, improve efficiency, and deliver greater value to the business. If you’d like to learn more about how to apply this principle in your team, feel free to book a call with us or visit our website for more insights and upcoming classes. We’d love to help your team start finishing!

There’s a quote in Lean that says, “Stop starting and start finishing.” It’s been around for quite some time, and it’s something that I use all the time with Scrum teams. While it is predominantly a Lean thing, there’s no reason why you can’t have Lean stuff in empirical stuff. There’s no reason why those two things can’t go together, and I think it’s really important for teams that are doing anything. Whatever type of work that we’re doing, we need to focus on finishing stuff, not on starting more stuff.

The traditional idea is that the more work we have underway, the more that we’re doing, which means that people and teams often juggle multiple things in what they do. When you’re juggling multiple things, you tend to find that less stuff gets done because you spend a bunch of cognitive cycles context switching. If you think of the work that Gerald Weinberg did in his book “Systems Thinking,” you might recall a graph that shows the number of projects underway and the amount of time that we lose to context switching. It’s about 20% per thing. So, if you’re doing two things at once, you’re going to lose 20% of your time, and it’s gone to context switching and your cognitive load.

You’re in the shower in the morning, and instead of the back of your brain solving the complex cognitive problems that will help your business be successful, the back of your brain is thinking about how to juggle these two or three projects. How do I keep these three projects’ stakeholders happy? If the back of your brain is occupied with juggling those things, you’re spending less time and focus on solving the actual problem that we’re here to solve, which provides your business with value. There’s no value to your business in juggling five things; all they care about is whether they are getting the value they expect.

There is a big push, especially from leadership, but I think there’s a little bit of a fallacy there. I don’t think leadership pushes it; I think middle management pushes it because they are under pressure to get more stuff done. If you’re sitting on a team and you have multiple masters, with multiple people telling you what to do, then you’re the one who has to juggle those multiple things. One of the things we talk about in Scrum is having a single product owner. That single product owner is the focus for what we are going to do next, what we are working on.

Depending on how your organisation is structured, this is not ideal. If you have multiple voices in your organisation, then the product owner becomes the funnel that allows the team to work on a single stream. The product owner has to deal with all the different stakeholders. I’m not saying the team won’t help; the rest of the developers will help with that. But the product owner becomes that final say, that point of knitting together all those different ideas and threads into a single cohesive story so that the team has focus and can maximise the value.

Lean talks about this as well, discussing having a definition of workflow. If you’re thinking of a Kanban strategy, you’re going to have that definition of your workflow. You decide what it’s going to be, and you’re effectively going to decide those things as well, like what things we work on. We’re going to limit our work in process for sure, but then how do we decide which thing we pick? A lot of teams pick the oldest thing; whatever has been hanging around the longest is what we’re going to pick. From the options, the stuff we haven’t started yet, we might order that by whatever we decide as a team that maximises the value.

You might order it by age, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea. Ordering it by value would be best; have the highest value stuff we’re going to pick next, and then we pull things based on that value and need. Lean focuses on the idea of the virtual product owner for creating that loom, whereas Scrum talks about it as an individual, a person who is going to do that. But the outcome is the same: you have a much tighter, cohesive story and focus for the team, which is really important.

That’s why we need to stop starting work and start finishing work. Ultimately, the more work we have in progress, the longer it takes to deliver. You can see that if you’ve ever used a cumulative flow diagram. You can very clearly see when the lines of the amount of work you’re starting and the amount of work you’re finishing get further apart. The amount of things you have in progress is increasing. If you’re getting further apart, then you’re starting more work than you’re finishing.

If the lines are getting further apart, then the horizontal line is also getting further apart, and the horizontal line is your approximate average cycle time. As you start more things and haven’t finished them, all of the things in the system take longer to deliver, and that’s not what we want. We want to have as short a time as possible that we’re working on things because that increases the throughput, the stuff delivered for the business. If we’re focused on valuable stuff, it hopefully maximises the value that we’re delivering to the business.

We can go through that process really quickly, which means the business gets predictability because they know if they give us something important and we take it on immediately, they know roughly how long it’s going to take to deliver it. It will be short because we’re focusing on shortening that cycle time. I think that’s the idea behind stopping starting work and starting finishing work. It matters for Lean teams, it matters for Scrum teams, and it matters for all teams. Stop starting work and start finishing it.

If you want to have a discussion about your unique needs or situation, then please book a call or visit us at Naked Agility. We also have our immersive and traditional public classes on our website, and we’d love to hear from you.

video Agile Scrum agile project management agile product development agile product management project management product development product management professional scrum trainer scrum training scrum certification scrum.org DevOps consultant DevOps coach DevOps engineer agile coach agile consultant agile trainer scrum framework scrum methodology scrum approach agile leadership leadership.

Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

Our Happy Clients​

We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.​

Brandes Investment Partners L.P. Logo
Lockheed Martin Logo
Akaditi Logo

NIT A/S

Lean SA Logo
Slaughter and May Logo
Bistech Logo
Milliman Logo
Teleplan Logo
Qualco Logo
Sage Logo
Epic Games Logo
Ericson Logo
Trayport Logo
Graham & Brown Logo
New Signature Logo
Big Data for Humans Logo
Slicedbread Logo
Nottingham County Council Logo
Ghana Police Service Logo
Washington Department of Transport Logo
Royal Air Force Logo
Washington Department of Enterprise Services Logo
New Hampshire Supreme Court Logo
Philips Logo
Higher Education Statistics Agency Logo
Illumina Logo
Milliman Logo
Boeing Logo

CR2