Does your team continually struggle to catch up to an interminable to-do list? You’re certainly not the only one.
Indeed, eight employees out of ten claim that they are stressed out at work, and out of those, 41% cite their workload as the cause of their stress (Source: ActivTrak, 2023).
If this feels like something that you are familiar with, it would be wise to think about setting Work in Progress (WIP) limits.
Teams who set WIP limits effectively tend to be able to see a 50% increase in the quality of their work.
As we move forward, this blog intends to guide you through five strategies for your team to set effective WIP limits.
So, let’s begin and make things simple!
How To Determine Work-In-Progress Limits
1. Understand the Need for WIP Limits
WIP limits are pivotal for boosting team performance and project outcomes by helping teams focus on fewer tasks, reducing bottlenecks, and improving efficiency.
This studyby Planview, for example, has found that WIP limits can cut cycle time by 30%; limits on WIP also prevent multitasking.
Team members work on what’s in front of them (present tasks), lowering context flipping and raising output by up to 40%.
Fewer jobs are also in progress, which results in faster delivery, more pleased customers, and more trust.
Organizations adopting WIP limits with good customer satisfaction see their WIP limits rise.
Do You Know? The concept of work-in-progress (WIP) limits originated in the Lean manufacturing movement, developed by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno in the 1940s and 1950s.
2. Consider WIP Limit Setting Factors
When setting WIP limits, several things must be taken into account:
Team Size:
The right WIP limit is directly linked to the number of team members, so a rough rule of thumb says that a WIP limit should range between the size of the team plus one (i.e., team size + 1) to the team increased by two (i.e., team size × 2).
So, if you have a team of 10 people, you would have a WIP cap of 11 and 20 jobs, and with this range, there’s plenty of freedom without adding extra work.
Team Consensus:
The whole team needs to be involved in setting the WIP limits; consensus helps ensure we all ‘get’ the boundaries and begin from a place of shared understanding and agreement.
It’s a process that engages team members along the way and uses group knowledge to determine what will work best for each person’s (workflow) patterns.
3. Experimentation and Iteration
The problem of how many WIP limits to use is not a one-time thing; you must try and improve.
Here’s what Teams should do:
Track Results
Once you have introduced the original WIP limits, watch the changes in the process over two weeks (ideally) such as how it changes the entire workflow.
During this phase, teams should record cycle times, job success rates, and bottlenecks.
Make Adjustments:
We changed the WIP limits after the testing phase based on what we noticed, for instance, if work never seems to get finished or team members think it’s too much or too little.
It might mean the bar isn’t high (or low) enough; the team can improve this balance to get the best mix for their unique relationships and tasks.
Examining the graph below, a 20% increase in WIP can be seen over a span of items from 49 to 59 a period during which there was a marked increase in figures.
4. Implementation Strategies for WIP Limits
Implementing WIP limits successfully involves several useful strategies:
Consistent Task Sizing
If you can, break down jobs into their components no bigger than 16 work hours.
This stability has been recognized as the correct number of factors to determine how many things can be done simultaneously.
Assume that you’re working on a project, such as offering new features on the software, and each of them can be split into smaller jobs.
Adjusting Based on Skill Sets:
Analyze how weak or good your partners are at their jobs, and optimize the process where some members have special skills by changing WIP based on their specialty.
Let’s say one worker is a master in front-end development and one more in back-end development.
You can assign each worker a different WIP limit based on the type of job it fits.
5. Building a Culture Around WIP Limits
Creating a mindset that accepts WIP boundaries is vital for long-term success:
Improved Focus and production: Teams within the WIP limit work on fewer jobs at a time and more outputs, resulting in more total production.
In addition to this, clear task limits can also make teams feel less stressed.
Reduction of Hidden Waste: Working this way pushes you to limit work and help expose wasted practices that might otherwise be unnoticeable.
For instance, regular evaluations can spot patterns such as some jobs are slow because the standards or relationships aren’t clear.
With this method, teams are urged to think in a continuous growth attitude and grow with their processes.
Small wins, enjoying the progress toward finishing a job, and improving and optimizing efficiency can create an environment where reducing work in progress is seen as a positive, not a negative.
Conclusion
Realizing and applying real Work In Progress limits is vital for an Agile development team to improve speed and process.
Understanding the need and how to set limits on these limits truly means that teams can achieve excellent success.
These methods urge the teams to try with their WIP limits which leads to continuous improvement and potentially higher output as they find what works best.
