[birthday]

That's where short cycles come into play. If something is urgent for business (and often everything is "urgent") then it can fall in the next cycle which is just 14 days away. It's rare that something is so urgent that it should disrupt your entire dev team flow and focus.

Also what happens is you end up with a never ending dev cycle where business expedites an item making the cycle a little longer, business sees the cycle is longer and thus adds in more items to be included further lengething the cycle... I think you get where this is going.

At my startup company we have suffered from just this in past, where we would have never ending dev cycles while our maintenance back logs filled up and never got worked on properly.