Dealing with Resistance to WiP Limits
This is one of what will become a series of blog posts that discuss and give options on how to deal with resistance to WiP limits.
Having WiP limits for the first time can be confronting for many teams and organisations. For those who have been utilisation or specialisation focused, the concept of flow and WiP limits may take time to get used to. It may involve unlearning what could be years of habit with another process – it’s not something that’s done overnight and it needs continual adjustment, encouragement and monitoring. Until teams have gotten into the discipline of following explicit WiP limits, there may be other ways to help enforce the WiP limits.
The catch-cry of many a Kanban team is “Stop starting, start finishing”. This often sounds simpler than what it means in practice. So, to help out I often suggest to teams that they use the “walk the board” from “right to left” during their daily stand-up / Kanban meeting. What does this mean? Consider this example board for a software team:
Get the team to start the stand up by looking at the right hand side of the board first. We have 2 items in Deployment – if anyone is free, ask if they can help with the deployment activities.
Then move to the next column to the left – Testing. If there are any defects then get any free engineers to focus on fixing the defect. Alternatively, you could have the engineers help testers with automation, data setup or any other activities that could help get the testing done.
Next, move onto development. Are there any free engineers to help with code reviews, build pipelines or any other development activities? If so focus on getting the development done for these tickets.
If there is nothing downstream for an idle engineer, then and only then can they pick up a new card from the To Do column.
Even without explicit WiP limits, you will find that just using this practice will assist your teams in limiting their work in process. By more explicitly focusing on moving the downstream tickets before starting new ones you will have “Stopped starting and started finishing”.
Once the team is used to this habit you can have deeper conversations with the team about what the explicit WiP limits should be.