How We Gave a Digital Delivery Team Time Back
Our team transformed a years-long backlog containing hundreds of unorganized requests into a governed delivery system. Our focus was reducing overtime hours for the team, improving predictability for executives, and shifting the focus towards strategic work that actually moved the business forward.
Situation
A mid-market company’s internal digital delivery team was drowning.
The backlog they stored work in had grown to literally hundreds of task cards. Some hadn’t been touched since before 2020.
Everything that came in was treated the same: drop it in the backlog and “we’ll get to it eventually”.
There was no prioritization system, no intake governance, and no differentiation or tracking of strategic initiatives vs one offs. The only reason it worked is because their team is so talented, driven, and loyal.
But they were permanently in reactive mode. Developers spent more time in meetings than they did on high-impact work. They picked up whatever the loudest request was that week and worked it.
Some projects had been dragging on for quite literally, years. Stakeholders from other departments were frustrated and trust had been severely damaged.
Action
After the 30-day diagnostic, it was crystal clear to us that this was not a people problem, it was a systems problem. And the root cause was in how work was accepted.
An unmanageable backlog: no team can manage hundreds of requests with no prioritization, no owner, and no defined process for what gets worked and when.
No intake governance: any request from stakeholders came in the same way, with very little information, no business case, so whatever was the loudest usually won.
No distinction between project vs ad hoc work: they had their highest priority projects sitting in the same queue as one off quick fixes.
No predictability: there was no structured path from request → execution, so the team couldn’t commit to delivery timelines with confidence which eroded trust with other departments.
Strategic work being deprioritized: whatever was the loudest won, meaning projects dragged on for years.
Team operated at an unsustainable capacity: overtime was celebrated and the team was burning out quick (there was a whole institutional knowledge issue that we also discovered in our diagnostic and needed to solve for).
The primary operational risks we identified was that the team was not underperforming, but perceived to be, so we needed to create a system to protect capacity, instill a culture of predictability, and give them the space they need to move strategic business initiatives forward.
Task
We embedded directly into the team, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work. Over five months we applied the following:
Establish intake criteria to be leveraged during a weekly grooming session with strict guardrails on what is removed vs kept in the backlog.
Implementing two distinct governance tracks for multi-task strategic initiatives versus ad hoc tasks. The team needed a system that matched the nature of the work to appropriate level of process.
Establishing a requirements gate for project work that required fully defined project requirements before any scoping was completed. Requirements included a PRD and a RACI matrix.
Restructure the backlog into defined stages that made sense for their workflows so all requests had a visible home at every stage of the lifecycle.
Remove noisy columns and archive hundreds of tasks that were old or defined as a lower priority.
Creating clear delineation between strategic vs one off work to protect the team’s capacity and ensure they had the space to focus on high-impact work.
Result
When you address the root cause of issues, things feel slow at first, but then compound quickly. By the end of five months there was immediate and measurable relief:
Velocity intentionally decreased to match actual capacity
Strategic vs one-off task balance improved by 48%
Delivery predictability improved by giving the team what they needed (PRD + RACI) before scoping work and timelines
Cross-team and stakeholder frustration decreased when a shared understanding was established around how work can enter, be evaluated, prioritized, and worked
Projects stopped dragging because everything had owners, boundaries, and finish lines from day one