The root cause is usually poor resource estimates (ie. not spending enough time estimating effort before committing to timelines).

Some estimating techniques: https://www.simplilearn.com/project-estimation-techniques-ar...

For a team’s ongoing everyday tasks, I’ve used parametric estimation with some success by defining team weekly capacity for productive work and then summing up the parametric estimates for all backlog tasks. You can then get a rough idea for the number of weeks to complete a bigger, more complex task.

You can even build a model to automate this estimation.