Kanban Board and Resource Utilization

In Kanban board, WIP basically refers to “Work in Progress” and some may call it “Work in Process” or “Work in Play”. Having too many WIP items is not suggested:

• WIP items consume money, effort and time; and they return nothing!
• WIP items hide issues in the overall process.
• WIP items have high potential of rework or redo.

Because of these problems, WIP items must be limited. For example, WIP limit of 5 means that only 5 items should be in the WIP column.

The challenge is some functional managers that are not aware of the values of limiting WIP! I have encountered functional managers that said “our developer has some free time and you’re telling me not to assign more tasks to him because of WIP limit in Kanban!”

The fact is the aim of WIP limit is to optimize the throughput of development, not resource utilization. If you still think that people should be busy working all the time and anything else otherwise is inefficiency, I may claim that you have not understood agile and specifically Kanban!

The value lies on the last column which is “DONE”. Focus on finishing whatever you have on your hand first, rather than picking up more and more items.