Little’s Law for Professional Scrum with Kanban

The fundamental result of Little’s Law is that for a given process, in general, the more things that you work on at any given time (on average) the longer it is going to take for each of those things to finish (on average). As a case in point, managers who are ignorant of this law panic when they see that their Cycle Times are too long and perform the exact opposite intervention of what they should do:  they start more work. After all, they reason, if things take so long, then they need to start new items as soon as possible so that those items finish on time—regardless of what is currently in progress.