Work management
Closing a sprint
What happens to work that did not finish, and who decides.
A sprint that ends leaves work behind. What happens to it has two defensible answers, so it is configuration rather than a rule.
- Automatic
- Unfinished work moves to the next planned sprint of the same cadence, or back to the backlog when there is none. The default — because asking every time produces a closing ritual nobody completes, and sprints that stay open for weeks while the next one fills up anyway.
- Explicit
- Closing is refused until somebody says where the work goes. For teams who want the carry-over conversation to actually happen rather than be absorbed silently.
Set it for the organisation, and override it per team. A team that has said nothing inherits rather than defaulting separately, so changing the organisation’s answer really does change theirs.
What closing never touches
The commitment is snapshotted when the sprint starts
Closing cannot revise it. That is the entire value of the figure: scope added mid-sprint stays visible as scope added, rather than quietly rewriting what was committed — which is the most common way a burndown is made to look better than the sprint was.
- Work never carries across cadences. A team does not inherit another’s leftovers.
- A sprint that never started cannot be closed — it would write a completion date for a sprint nobody worked in, and it would count in velocity.
- Only one sprint runs at a time per cadence, or *what are we doing now* is answerable two ways.