Limit WIP: possibly the simplest most underrated advice
I wrote this the other day on my LinkedIn page:
“For the love of God, just limit WIP!”
I sometimes feel like I should just print this in a funny meme on a bunch of t-shirts and sweaters, and that’s all I’d wear to work. 😅
It’s too easy to get a sense of progress by starting things. You do your planning quarterly, monthly, or whatever cadence you happen to use, and you feel good about what you’re pulling next.
But have you properly reflected on what happened last cycle? How much have you actually finished, and with what kind of lead time? How does that compare with what is expected?
Here’s a simple exercise prompt by John Cutler:
"Imagine we started no new work.... When would you actually start feeling like you had nothing to do?"
It’s not about what you start. But what gets finished.
David Anderson has given us a simple decision filter that can be empowering on that front: “Stop starting. Start finishing”.
It turns out that the perfect meme does exist (unfortunately, I'm not sure about the creator, so I can't give the proper credit):
And the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this might as well be the simplest most underrated advice ever for organizations in knowledge work! It's a lesson that the physical manufacturing world has learned quite some time ago, which starts by visualizing and managing inventory, but knowledge work is invisible, so it's more challenging to accomplish the same.
It's doable, though, and in fact, a whole body of knowledge has evolved largely around that simple idea: the Kanban method, with its 6 general practices:
Visualize work
Limit WIP
Manage flow
Make policies explicit
Implement feedback loops
Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
It's simple yet so often hard to implement – from what I observe and my own experience. As intuitive and obvious as it might sound, the underlying thing we are trying to accomplish, creating focus, is still so often missed by organizations somehow.
I have lived enough, though, to understand the obvious is worth remembering or reiterating. And that, in fact, common sense is less common than one would think... There seems to be just something about that sort of false sense of progress by (the excitement of) initiation, starting something new—that's my hypothesis at least. Where we often fool ourselves.
And yes, there's more than one way of getting the desired outcome, of creating focus. I even wrote about it before, creating a small categorization system. You can use:
Enabling limits (such as a WIP limit).
Enabling heuristics (some useful rule-of-thumb that empowers tactical decisions).
Enabling signals (like flow metrics or aging).
You can even mix and match and apply different tactics to get to the beauty, which is to create focus and how that can enable accomplishing better outcomes. But again, quite likely the simplest way to get started is to limit the WIP. Which by the way, and ideally, you would do at all relevant levels:
From business goals (what you are optimizing for now) and strategic initiatives you are pursuing at a given time…
To (how many) products, programs, projects, and deliverables you are prioritizing now…
To what is happening in teams, units, etc.
It isn't rocket science, but somehow sometimes it feels like people feel it is more complicated than it has to be. Maybe (as another hypothesis), something about getting stuck on what is the right amount. If that is the case, allow me to provide a couple of simple heuristics to get your head around it:
The ideal WIP limit is always 1 (thing at a time).
But it turns out that knowledge work flow is a bit more complex than that. And quite often, the ideal is neither realistic nor desirable (for not being a good enough trade-off balancing demands and capacity).
So, assuming you don't have any ongoing equivalent practice to create focus, it will quite likely be considerably less than what you are doing today. Get started by reducing some.
What that tells us is that we need to uncover empirically what is a good limit, and it will be one of those cases where we know when we 'feel' it... Because we will experience things like:
• Focus on finishing work (and thus hopefully faster value creation).
• Sense of urgency to solve impediments.
• Reduced context switch (thus less cognitive load on people).
Here are a few additional insights that could help you get going:
If you have more work in progress fronts than people in a team, consider bringing it down to less than the number of people (with that, avoid multitasking and nurture more true collaboration).
What's the gap between expected delivery lead times and current performance in delivery lead times? That might be a useful signal of how much you could consider reducing in WIP
Or as simple as: what do people feel is a good starting point, perhaps considering some of the known insights of current delivery lead times and stuff like that.
By no means are these prescriptions or anything like that. You have to figure it out in your context – by not starting new work before finishing ongoing work, by keeping an eye on signals, by trying out different limits, and stuff like that. Hopefully this gives some perspective that the least useful thing is to get stuck in overcomplicating what is largely as simple as the meme articulates...
“For the love of God, just limit WIP!”
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact.