As a part of [[An Elegant Puzzle]] Falling Behind | [[Treading Water]] | [[Repaying Debt]] | [[Innovating]] --- # Overview > A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than it was the week before. Typically, people are working extremely hard but not making much progress, morale is low, and your users are vocally dissatisfied. > > Page 35 # System Fix > When the team is falling behind, the system fix is to hire more people until the team moves into treading water. Provide tactical support by setting expectations with users, beating the drum around the easy wins you can find, and injecting optimism. > > As a caveat, the system fix is to hire net new people, increasing the overall capacity of the company. Sometimes people instead attempt to capture more resources from the existing company, and I'm pretty negative on that. People are not fungible, and generally folks end up in useful places, so I'm skeptical of reassigning existing individuals to drive optimality. By nature, it's also impossible for this kind of discussion to not become political, even when everyone involved has deep trust in and respect for each other. > > Page 37