The Surprising Benefits of Limiting Work in Progress

I bet you think that by doing less work at any given time, your teams will be doing less work altogether. Your organisation has so much to do that it’s better to do half of everything than all of something. How’s that working out for you?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have many things started but nothing finished. Surely your stakeholders and customers need you to get something out of the door so you can start generating revenue for your organisation?

One of my favourite Kanban practices to introduce to Scrum teams is limiting the amount of work in progress for every activity in their workflow. This allows the team to focus on the work they have in hand and do it to the best of their ability before moving on to something else.

Increasing Delivery Rate

When everything’s important, then nothing’s important. I’ve lost count of how many teams I’ve said this to. If you want a piece of work to get out the door, you must work on it to completion. Stop starting, start finishing. Teams need to concentrate on as few items as possible to do their work effectively and efficiently. It is a glorious moment to watch a team realise that they have started to get work across the line. Who doesn’t love the sense of achieving something after all?! ?

Reducing the Cost of Delay

It’s easy to measure how much something costs to create but less easy to measure how much it costs not to sell it yet. And so most of us don’t. Think about a factory. What would happen if part-finished products were lying all over the factory floor and the incomplete inventory kept growing? Do you think those products are an asset or a liability? All work that is only partially done is a liability, whether in a factory setting or knowledge work. Get your work completed and out of the door so that it can start earning you revenue and no one falls over it and sues you.

Increasing Pairing and Swarming

As there’s less work in progress for each activity within the team’s workflow, more people have to work on each item. This is a great way to avoid creating silos within a team. Think of the last time someone key in the team went on holiday or was ill, and you had to schedule the team’s workflow around that absence. What a pain was that? If teams practice pairing and swarming (three or more people) on work items, then more than one person will know the same thing about everything that is worked on. This is a natural way of reducing the risk of your organisation.

Reducing Context Switching

Think of those moments when you’re making dinner, trying to organise with a parent down the road a play date at the weekend, thinking about the things you have to do at work tomorrow, and suddenly your partner walks in and asks you a question. What is the impact? I bet it slows everything down (and potentially sends you into a spiralling rage).

The same is true for every team in every workplace. When you switch between tasks, you have to stop to think about where you got to the last time you worked on it. The cost of context switching is high, and in business, it’s an expensive waste.

Increasing Communication Within the Team

When there’s a limited amount of work that can be done at any given time, then people have to talk to each other more. It encourages conversations about how things further down the workflow can be moved out of the way to stop causing bottlenecks for other people. Daily Scrum meetings can suddenly become less of a status update and more of a moment to collaborate on how the team will progress towards the sprint goal.

When smart people have to work out loud, they get smarter. There are countless times I’ve been stuck on a problem, and just by talking it over with another person, I’ve realised what the solution is. I’m sure everyone has used someone as a sounding board before, so why wouldn’t you encourage your teams to work out loud as much as possible?

Reducing the Burden on the Team

We quickly feel overwhelmed when we have too many things to work on. When our teams have so many things in progress, questions are asked about whether or not these people are performing. Perhaps the bosses start asking questions about how we can manage people who produce nothing. By reducing the amount of work in progress and increasing the flow through the system, our teams can start to shine, and the burden of pressures from both themselves and their managers will be reduced.

So When Can Your Team Limit Their WiP?

Today, of course! Start by numbering how many items there are currently in each activity of the team’s workflow. Reduce one of the activities WiP limit by one and see its impact after a few days. Gradually keep reducing the WiP limit to find the optimal flow rate for your team. Are you brave enough to take it down to one?