Limit work in progress
The Overlap #37
The Overlap is a newsletter somewhere between product development and organizational development. It comes out every other Wednesday.
This is the last edition for this year! You’ll get the next edition on January 19th.
In our last edition, we talked about how Kanban boils down to three simple practices:
Visualize your work
Pull work (don’t push it)
Limit work in progress
We’ve talked about the benefit of 2). Today, we’ll talk about the benefit of 3): limiting work in progress.
Our effort to be efficient prevents us from getting stuff done
All businesses want to be efficient. We want to use our time, money, and attention as wisely as possible.
This leads us to believe that underutilized capacity is a waste. “If our developers aren’t coding at almost every hour of the day, we’re losing money.”
We’ll fill each stage with tasks in the name of efficiency:
This creates queues. Work is waiting in line to get done.
What we forget is that work that is being waited on has a cost. Either in the form of time or money. We’re also unaware of how much queues cost us. This is known as the Cost of Delay: our business will lose more money the longer a task sits in a queue.
By “maximizing utilization”, we unintentionally cost our businesses money. We create longer lead times: work takes even longer to ship because of our effort to maximize utilization. This is against what we actually want: shipping work as quickly as possible. Turns out it isn’t efficient to keep our teams “fully utilized.”
This is why we limit work in progress.
Set WIP (Work In Progress) limits
If we constrain the amount of work our teams take on at once, our teams can get more done. They minimize context switching. They preserve their flow states. They produce quality work.
Every team’s WIP limit looks different. You’ll know what works best for you.
If you need a place to start, try a WIP limit of 2-3 tasks (that take more than one day) under each column on your board. Make this WIP limit visible on your board. And then keep an eye on whether more (or less) tasks get moved to `Done` .
Reflect on your WIP limits
Now, commit to the WIP limit! And commit to revisiting your WIP limit at a future date (say, a month from setting it).
On your revisit date, guide your team to reflect on these three questions:
Have we ever exceeded our WIP limit? What’s our justification when we exceed our WIP limits?
If your team hasn’t exceeded its WIP limit, nice! If your team has exceeded it, help them understand why. It can often be a sign of saying yes to many requests from different stakeholders. Or perhaps the WIP limit isn’t visible — we set it and forget it.
Have we produced more work? Or are we still producing about the same amount?
The point of a WIP limit is to help your team get more done. If it’s not doing that, why isn’t it? Seeing the same level of productivity after using WIP limits can be a sign that the WIP limit is either too high or too low. Determine if it’s too high or too low. Then readjust.
What bottlenecks keep coming up? How can we remove those bottlenecks in the future?
A bottleneck can be:
A manager who approves every single piece of code before it’s pushed to production
An assumption that every piece of design work needs feedback
Literally a lack of time. In which case, why don’t we have enough time to do the work? Can we adjust our WIP limit to give us more time to get work done?
Don’t set it and forget it. Actively revisit your WIP limits, so that your team is
shipping high quality work
learning as quickly as possible at how to better do 1)
An arbiter of less, calm, and focus
In a culture of more, your job as a product manager / org designer is to be an arbiter of less, calm, and focus. WIP limits are a tool to help you do that.
We know it’s rational to take on less, prioritize, and focus. But our instinct wants us to do more. We unintentionally overload our teams, our organization, and ourselves. We have to remember that it’s easier for an underutilized team to take on more than an overutilized team to take on less.
Do less. Less means more focus on the highest impact work.
What I’m Reading/Listening To
What I’m Sending
My climbing goal this year was to send my first outdoor V6. I limited myself to projecting two outdoor V6’s this climbing season (speaking of limiting WIP).
This one took me over twenty attempts. But I’m proud to say that I finally got it!
See you January 19th,
–tim