Sprints that have tickets that sit from sprint to sprint

[Esmeralda DeArmas]

Hello, 

We work off sprints and some of our tickets tend to sit for several sprints because they await Vendor feedback as well as business waiting tickets. Is there anything we can do so they don't count against us for the sprint?. The issues in UAT that sit waiting for the business to test we are going to break off the workflow into their own workflow from UAT to Prod However is there anything we can do for our Vendor waiting and business waiting tickets or is the only option adding a backlog bucket?  I would like to keep it in the active view so we don't forget about them but not sure how we can combat items that sit ??

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Esmeralda DeArmas 

What do you mean by:

Is there anything we can do so they don't count against us for the sprint?

You seem to be describing the team is working on items using the Scrum Framework, and those items have dependencies on people who are not on the team, leading to blocking situations, where customers/business partners ask for things they are not ready to accept...or the team is asking the vendor to provide feedback at a pace greater than what was agreed upon.  This is helpful information as it shows a mismatch between what the team is planning and what can be delivered in a sprint.

Rather than altering how Scrum helps see such dependencies, consider discussing with the team how they accept/plan/breakdown work to eliminate dependencies and/or that all requestors and participants are available during the sprint.  If that is not possible, perhaps using Kanban rather than the Scrum Framework could better align with the team's value stream.

Kind regards,
Bill