Laser focus your team using Work-In-Progress limits + step-by-step guide on how to get started.

Guess what?
Swip now supports Work in Progress limits (confetti in the air) (party) (mutant-ninja-turtles dancing).

Work in Progress what???….
Alright, fair enough.
We built Swip to help both freshios (means fresh or new but sounds a bit hipper) and more experienced folks to get started with the Lean and scale it. If the first sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, please continue reading, but if it does you can skip next couple of paragraphs and read about some tips & trick of implementing WIPs. I advise you, though, to read the whole post because… who knows, you may learn something new.

What’s Work in Progress (WIP) limits?

Work in Progress limits or WIP for short is one of the core principles of the Kanban method (which in itself is part of Lean, but more on this topic in another blog post). There are total of 7 principles which are: visualization, limiting work in progress, flow management, making policies explicit, using feedback loops, collaborative improvement, and experimental evolution. We will discuss these in more details in upcoming series of blog posts. WIP as many things in modern management derives from manufacturing. Actually tracking WIP is common practice in manufacturing, it even has a monetary value which represents the total amount of stock that is blocked in producing now.
The goals of WIP limits is to streamline the workflow by limiting the amount of work the team has at a given state and by that minimize multitasking and context switching. WIP limits are set per state and define the maximum amount of tasks this state can have at a given time. So for example, if you have a pretty standard workflow which contains the states ToDo, Doing, Done, a WIP limit of 3 for Doing means that there can’t be more than 3 tasks in this state.

Why setup WIP limits?

Lean is all about continuous improvement and WIP limits are one of the core drivers of this process. WIP limits help you to find and recognize problems in your workflow which otherwise are hidden and not so easy to spot. It helps you discover where the bottlenecks are, notice issue points which must be further examined and overall gives you enough knowledge on which to further improve.

David Anderson, the father of Kanban method states in his book: „I have become convinced that not setting WIP limits is a mistake.“.

If you imagine your workflow to be a stream WIP limits will help you ensure that it flows smoothly.

Where to start?

First, let me start by saying that there aren’t perfect WIPs and there is a pretty good chance that your initial setup won’t be that good. This is one of these cases that you have to ensure it’s done instead of trying to make it perfect. David Anderson defines Kanban as „an empirical system“ and as such you have to tweak and test to find what works best for your team.

Tip #1: Always define WIP limits by taking # of teammates into account.

Tip #2: A good starting point would be to set an initial WIP limit of 1 per person.

The best case scenario is that every team member works on only 1 task. This prevents multitasking and ensures that a given task get done all the way. However, we don’t live in a perfect world and sometimes there are tasks that are waiting on 3rd parties or are blocked for some reason. Also in some departments, the essence of the work is such that it’s kind of impossible to work only on 1 task. Such examples are marketing and sales departments. In this cases you can extend the WIPs to 2–3 per person, depending on what would work.

Tight limits vs. Loose limits

As mentioned before it will take some experimentation before finding WIP limits that work best for your team. You can take one of two general approaches when experimenting. You can either take the „tight“ approach or the „loose“ approach.

In tight approach you start by setting pretty……tight limits. These range from 1–3 in my experience and ensure that the workflow is streamlined. It also helps to easily spot bottlenecks. I will advise newcomers to start with this approach and tune accordingly. This approach is also really good for newly established processes.

The loose approach, of course, is exactly the opposite. Here the WIP per person can go to 7 or even more. The main benefit of this approach is that it doesn’t add stress when applied to the already existing process. When introducing Lean to an established organization start with loose and tighten the WIPs.

Tight or Loose?

Personally, I prefer the tight approach as it adds a healthy amount of stress to the workflow. It also drives members to address somewhat inconvenient topics and resolve them early in the process. Another good „side-effect“ is that helps members switch to the mindset where they work on fewer tasks simultaneously. The loose approach also has its benefits as it’s easy to introduce and get started with using WIPs, so give it a tough before choosing one.

Queue column

The queue column is the place where you add the things you want to get done for a given period of time or scope (how PM-y of me). In its core Kanban has a continuous flow, however, some batching is OK in other to be able to predict and forecast what to expect. In a basic workflow, the queue column is ToDo.

What David Anderson points out as a general rule of thump for the size of the column is the work you want to get done in a week period. Similar to the size of the WIP limits here also is required some experimenting. Although the recommended period is one week you have to find what works best for you as it may be too short of a period for some projects. For example, with Swip our queue contains what we have to get done for the next release, so here the size of the batch is driven by the scope of what we want to get done and not the timeframe (although we manage the time frame with due dates). Another important thing that you have to take into account is the granularity of the tasks. If most of the tasks are smaller in size the WIP limits for this column will be higher than if the tasks were bigger in size.

Fighting bottlenecks with buffer states

You will start noticing the bottlenecks pretty soon after you implement WIP limits. To fight them use buffer state. A buffer state is added right before the bottleneck. The WIP limits of the buffer should be as little as possible. Although a convenient way to tackle bottlenecks, you still have to find the root cause of it and fix the core problem. A great way to find it is by applying the 5 whys, a technique developed and used by Sakichi Toyoda.

Before buffer state.

After buffer state.

Start and improve over time

As mentioned earlier WIP limits are one of the core drivers of continuous improvement. In its essence, this means that you will suck in the beginning. Embrace it! Recognizing that something doesn’t work means that you have room for improvement and Lean is pretty good at pointing that you suck, so get used to it :)

Getting something done is always better than waiting to become perfect. Tweak and improve over time but don’t get one stay in the way of the other.

How WIP limits in Swip work

There are two ways to set WIP limits in Swip.

• From Global project settings — click on project options and select „Set WIP limits“ to enable WIP setup mode.

• From state settings — click on state options and choose „Set WIP limits“ from the drop-down.

Types of WIP states

After the WIPs are set up you will notice three different statuses indicated by the color of the state.

• Below WIP Limits — the indicating color of the state is blue.
• WIP Limits reached — the indicating color of the state is yellow.
• WIP Limits exceeded — the indicating color of the state is red.

Color coding the different phases helps to easily spot where WIPs have been exceeded and where may soon be. If WIPs are not setup the number on the state indicates how many tasks there are in a given column.

So what’s next?

That is an easy one.
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