posted 13th February 2023
Intro
Are you looking for a new way to boost the productivity of your team? Are backlogs overflowing and timelines stretching out of reach? Are you looking for ways to guarantee a steady, continuous flow of work from backlog to delivery? The answer may lie in setting limits on work-in-progress (WiP). For teams, WiP limits are a powerful tool that can enable them to build and deliver high-quality products more quickly. But does the concept of limits stick out like a sore thumb when you think about your organisation and processes in your context? It’s easy to understand why: work-in-progress (WiP) limits go against our instincts. We feel more creative, free, and unrestricted without them—not to mention that modern technology is designed for us to store as much information as possible. However, WiP limits are key components of flow in successful teams and can help improve their overall productivity if implemented strategically.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how setting WiP limits can help your team achieve maximum throughput and balance focus with agility. We'll provide practical tips and advice on how to select effective WiP limits as well as cover areas like monitoring progress or mitigating risk that should be considered alongside any WiP limit policy. By the end of this post, you should have an understanding of why it's important to set WiP limits and how best to implement them in your organisation.
What is a WiP Limit and how does it affect Flow?
A Work in Progress (WiP) Limit is a policy that a team may agree upon to so they do not exceed the agreed limit. This can be applied at the stage of work (per column if you are working on some of the more common workflow tools) or across the entire workflow. You may also apply this at the work type (or swim-lane level). You can also have WiP limits as a minimum level to keep (a buffer) so a team is not starved of work. So how do these affect flow? By limiting the amount of work in the system, it allows us to focus on this and not overload the system where work can block the system. To use an analogy to bring this to life, if you picture the M25 in London at 03:00am, there are less cars on the road and the traffic is flowing. Now compare this to rush hour at 07:30am, there are so many more cars on the road and the traffic is now at a standstill. This is how WiP limits can help the flow of work by having these limits understood and adhered to, we know how many cars are on the road and we stop having too many so the road can cope with the demand placed on it.
How to introduce a WiP Limit
To introduce a WiP limit, we really, first of all, need to understand our system, by visualising how we deliver value and the stages of work it goes through (as you can see in the simplified image above). From here we can look at how much work our system can cope with and how fast we’d like to see the work realised in a sustainable and predictable manner. An easy step to testing this out is to maybe start off with per-person WiP limits in the team (See in example 1 in the image above). The reason this can be a nice way to start is that it allows people to understand what they can cope with and identify any skills gaps or personnel bottlenecks we might have (only Jean can do this and they only work Wednesdays). You can also look at options for limit per column/work state type (As shown above in example 2, where they are limiting the number of work items they may have in development). Another option is a Cap WiP Limit (as you can see from example 3 above) where we limit the total number of items in our system regardless of who is working on the item or what state the item is currently being worked in.
All said, we really want to evaluate and evolve our Work In Progress (WiP) Limit Policies but if you are stuck, individual WiP Limits can be a great way to start rather than endlessly worrying about the perfect number or waiting for the perfect conditions to be in place to start. I’d say, just start and evolve with what you learn.
Final thoughts on WiP Limit and Flow
If you’re looking to increase your productivity, one area you can focus on is reducing your work in progress (WiP). When you have too many projects or tasks underway at the same time, it can lead to the system being overloaded by symptoms such as context switching resulting in a loss of Flow. But by setting a WiP limit and using tools to help you stick to that limit, you can maintain your Flow and get more done. If you want to learn more about how the Kanban Method can help you introduce, manage, and evolve WiP Limits to realise flow, check out our Kanban University courses on our website.