I was just reading that if you have unfinished items at the end of a Sprint, you should put them back into the backlog and re-sort by value, or, in the worst case, roll back the work. That's awful advice.

You are creating Lean "inventory"—work done (and money spent) that doesn't generate revenue. Inventory is a huge source of waste. If you're not "finishing," you need to learn to work in smaller increments and narrow the scope of work to something that can be done in a couple of days at most. Anything else is just a band-aid over a bad process. It takes work to make the work small, but not doing that is just laziness. If the work was so unimportant that it's okay not to finish it, why were you doing it in the first place? The item never should have been on the backlog.

Frankly, I'd dump the backlog entirely. It is not helping you. Instead, do the most valuable, smallest thing. Get feedback. Decide what to do next based on that feedback. The Sprint is a periodic *review* cycle, not some bag you fill with work. It's not some tragedy if the bag isn't empty when the review hits. Sure, review on a regular cycle, but if you're in the middle of something when the review happens, just keep working after the review. I don't see the problem.

— Allen Holub

Bad news doesn’t travel up.

I started my career on an eXtreme Programming team where we constantly evolved our processes and openly discussed what wasn’t working. Being my first job out of college, I thought this was standard practice. After working at several companies since then, I’ve learned that such transparency and commitment to process improvement is actually quite rare.

The book, “The Fearless Organization” dives into this a bit.

People don’t speak up because of:

• Don't criticize something the boss may have helped create.
• Don't speak up unless you have solid data.
• Don't speak up if the boss's boss is present.
• Don't speak up in a group with anything negative about the work to prevent a boss from losing face.

Speaking up brings career consequences.

It sure does.

Things take the time they take, not the time you hope they will take. Pushing for half-time produces half-baked.

— Jerry Weinberg

The biggest problem I see those teams struggle with is very simple. They aren't teams.

— Vasco Duarte

The greatest trick we ever pulled on ourselves as knowledge workers was convincing ourselves we could juggle multiple projects with no consequences.

— Jason Lengstorf