Why Manage WIP?

Having too much Work in Process, also known as Work in Progress (WIP), is a remarkably common issue. In my experience, management often encourages this behavior. I don’t know if it is the notion that we will get more done if we work on more things simultaneously. Or perhaps there is a fear we won’t get enough things done unless we work on several of them at once.

But what happens when we try to work on a few stories each? Remarkably, we make progress on several, but complete precious few. The more work in flow, the more context switching we all need to make. Coordination of the stories complicates testing and migrations. We look busy, but at the end of the iteration, we’ve fewer things complete. Then, at the beginning of the next iteration, a glut of work moves to done, setting us up with a couple day delay wrapping up the prior iteration and pushing us into yet another complicated cycle.

Drive each card to completion before picking up the next one. If a card is blocked, make getting it un-blocked a priority rather than letting it wait three days because George on the DBA team has a three-day SLA.

You Cannot Multitask Complex Tasks

Even when we break our work down into small chunks, we have a certain cognitive load that comes with the work. — There’s the purpose of the work: What is it for? Why do we need it now? —…