Stop starting and start finishing, the definitive talk on WIP - Matt Hosking

Let’s talk about getting things done! From team-level to whole-enterprise scale, the amount of work inside the system directly affects the amount of value being delivered.

This talk starts with some history of work study since the 1920’s, and introduces base concepts of lead time, processing time, percentage complete and accurate, and throughput. From there we will explore visualisation of work at a variety of levels in an enterprise and look at some of the constructs we can apply to limit work in progress; also delving into batch size, queuing theory and flow optimisation to add further context.

Next, we will take a look at economic prioritisation of work, ensuring that the work that we do choose to deliver is the most important and valuable to the enterprise.

Lastly we will step into organisational design and look at the perils of utilisation-based planning (keeping everyone busy), not limiting WIP overall, and not structuring around Value, closing off with some ideas for re-structuring and re-planning at enterprise-level.

There will be something for everyone in this talk; an engineer inside a delivery team, a C-suite executive, and everyone in between.

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Agile on the Beach is a leading annual conference in Falmouth, Cornwall UK. Since 2011 Agile on the Beach has been a two day agile conference, set on the Cornish coast with a beach party in between. The conference explores agile software, products, teams, business and practices. With over 400 attending, the conference hosts 50 seminars and workshops to provide the ultimate agile learning experience, along with ample opportunities for networking at its three evening events.

[matthosking]

Sadly the slides captured don't show the several animations of objects moving across the boards, but hopefully the narration makes sense.