What are the best practices for managing work in progress (WIP) limits in Kanban?

2 Why are WIP limits important?

WIP limits are essential for implementing the core principles of Kanban, such as visualizing the work, limiting the WIP, and optimizing the flow. Limiting the WIP can bring many benefits, such as improving the quality and speed of work by focusing on fewer tasks and reducing waste, errors, and rework. It also increases transparency and collaboration amongst team members by making work and its status visible. Additionally, it enhances flexibility and responsiveness by enabling faster feedback, learning, and adaptation to customer needs and priorities. Lastly, it reduces stress and frustration by avoiding overcommitment, interruptions, and context switching.

3 How to set WIP limits?

When setting WIP limits for your Kanban team, there is no one-size-fits-all formula. You must take into account various factors such as the size and skill of your team, the complexity and variability of your work, the capacity and demand of your system, and the goals and expectations of your stakeholders. A good starting point is to use historical data, empirical observation, or a simple estimation to determine the average number of tasks or items that your team can handle in each stage of the workflow. However, you should not treat this baseline as a fixed rule. Monitor performance and feedback from your team, adjusting WIP limits as needed. Metrics such as lead time, cycle time, throughput, and flow efficiency can help measure the impact of WIP limits on your workflow. Ultimately, you should strive for a balance that allows your team to work at a sustainable pace and deliver value consistently; aim for lower rather than higher WIP limits to achieve the benefits of limiting the WIP.

4 How to enforce WIP limits?

Enforcing WIP limits is not enough. You must ensure your team follows and respects them. Make the limits visible and explicit, display them on the Kanban board and communicate to the team and stakeholders. Explain the rationale and benefits of WIP limits and how they align with values and goals. Empower the team to self-organize and self-manage, don't impose or dictate the limits. Involve them in setting and adjusting, encourage ownership and accountability for their work. Foster a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement among team members. Implement a pull-based system, where the team pulls work from the backlog when they have capacity, use policies such as WIPAs or classes of service to prioritize and allocate work based on the WIP limits.

5 How to deal with exceptions and challenges?

WIP limits should be adaptive and responsive to the changing realities and needs of your team and customers. However, there may be situations where the WIP limits are challenged or violated, such as urgent or unplanned work, blocked or dependent work, and variable or uncertain work. To handle these cases, you can create a separate buffer or lane for expedite work with a low WIP limit and define clear criteria for using it. Additionally, you can mark blocked or paused items with a distinct color or symbol and escalate them as soon as possible. For variable or uncertain work, you can use relative units of measurement to estimate and limit the WIP and break down the work as you learn more about it.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?