5/6 - Right Size Your Work for Better Predictability

Mark Grove will join the DC Lean + Agile Meetup on May 6, 2026 at 12pm ET.

### Topic: Right Size Your Work for Better Predictability

Having trouble figuring out the right amount of work to bring into your team’s workflow? Struggling to accurately predict when work items will be completed? Does it seem that no matter what story size you choose, everything takes about the same amount of time? Does it really matter?
In this informative and insightful session, we’ll explore the concept of “right-sizing.” Right-sizing is the practice of appropriately sizing work items so they can be completed within a reasonable timeframe, given the variability of the workflow. We’ll show how to right-size your work using the cycle time workflow metric and a Cycle Time Distribution (CTD) Chart. Right sizing works better because it aligns work to fit delivery flows, even when complexity is hard to gauge upfront (a common challenge for AI and data-centric teams where traditional relative sizing often breaks down).
We’ll look at what workflow really means, the role uncertainty and complexity play in your team’s process, and how wait times can dramatically affect getting work to Done. We’ll explore tools that help you take advantage of working in a non-deterministic, non-prescriptive system so you can make more reliable delivery forecasts.

### About the Speaker:

Mark Grove is an Agile Coach and an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) and Certified Kanban Coach with Kanban University. He has over 25 years in the IT profession with the last 12 years focusing on coaching individuals and teams while leveraging practices from both the Kanban method and Scrum framework. His coaching and mentoring focus on system optimization, value delivery, team dynamics, servant leadership, and the agile mindset to welcome and embrace change. He has developed and delivered numerous interactive training sessions to the general-public and for private engagements and has spoken at several agile conferences and meetups.