The teams that I have worked with, don't think and talk about Sustainable Pace enough. I believe that finding a team's sustainable pace is important part of its Agile journey. Let's talk about it a little bit.
Why is Sustainable Pace important?
One of the reasons of having any software development process is to be able to predict the future. For various legitimate reasons, teams need to predict when a piece of software will roll out to production. For example - release dates help co-ordinate work between various teams - example Software, Hardware, Marketing, Sales etc.
A team working at a sustainable pace is predictable. Sustainable pace allows teams to have a certain amount of confidence when they make their commitments.
How to achieve Sustainable Pace?
Team Driven Commitments:
One of the ways to achieve sustainable pace is to get your team to do the sprint commitments without any coercion.
Team Leads / Managers should be involved in facilitating the sprint commitment process - by providing relevant data points, but should stay away from making commitments for the team. This isn't always easy to do especially for projects with extremely tight deadlines. However, my recommendation would be to err on the side of team driven commitments as much as possible.
As a Scrum Master, you can help the team hold itself accountable when the team makes the commitments freely without any coercion.
Approach:
Usually, projects with tight deadlines come from some executive saying - "this is due yesterday if we are to be successful". If you are in a position where you accept such business critical challenges for your team, consider saying - "We will focus on delivering continuous value to the customer" instead of - "this system will be delivered on (insert a ridiculous deadline here)".
Even if it is easily possible to have a system ready by the said date, it may not be something that the customer really wants when that day actually arrives. When you focus on delivering value, you don't have to wait for the entire system to be ready before letting the customer play with it. This means you will most probably deliver a working system (and possibly a few customer focused updates) sooner than the deadline. This gives your team some room to find a sustainable pace, which helps them be predictable and sets you up for success.
All in all, I believe sustainable pace is an extremely important part of a team's Agile journey and should be a topic of conversation for the team and executives alike.
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