Kanban WIP limits - Agile Coach (2019)

WIP limits work by setting a maximum number of kanban cards that can be in any one stage of kanban board concurrently. A WIP limit of 6 would mean that only 6 cards can be in that column at one time.

The main benefit of WIP limits is completing the selected work items in a more timely manner. This can be counterintuitive as your team is taking on less work at one time. By doing this, teams often increase their efficiency and go on to complete more work over time.

Setting WIP limits is something your team will have to experiment with. A good rule of thumb is to take the number of team members and multiply that by 1.5 or 2. On Jira Software and Trello, it's easy to add this new WIP limit to your board. We also teach you how to do it with physical kanban boards.

#YourAgileCoach

[montyindaghetto]

Damn Sacha, really dropped the ball on that one bro.

[biophilic]

great teaching. The way you teach by doing simple stuff is magnificent

[NicoleTeacher]

That demo with Sacha was perfect! This video was very useful. Thank you.

[dominiquelambert]

What you described as Lead Time is actually Cycle Time. Lead time is longer and starts with when a customer request has been made. Besides that, cool video, although there are way more ways to determine WiP, and we could also look at what´s the WiP when technically everybody can do everything ;-)

[luangasco]

Wait, isn’t lead time the time when the ticket got created to when it went live? You explained cycle time instead if I am not wrong which is when the work started on the ticket to when it went live.

[rbennett]

I loved the ping-pong ball analogy. I'm going to use it with my team today.

[HK-yose]

Concurrent work styles are the new sexy thing in engineering. But it is good to see, that you guys see it the same way. As line manager I always pushed for the serial production style. Do one thing at a time. You will be more focused and get the things done. Further your clients love it. Because you'll keep your promises for the due date.

[sanchezboyz]

Awesome vid, tomorrow I will have a meeting where I will propose wip limit and will use your example, thanks pal!

[gowris]

Fantastic Video.. Loved the simplistic way in which the concepts are explained..

[Seema]

Thank you.... now I m able to correlate everything to my job.

[aboelzz]

Simpel and great video, you made it easy for me to exaplain WIP for others, thanks.

[talafim]

Thanks for the video, straight to the point 👌

[MrJatinderseehra]

Thanks, a really useful series of videos, you explained kanban very clearly.

[stank]

Very good series on Kanban for beginners!

[geekychicster]

Great analogy! Really helped to fully understand WIP

[thaboshikwambane]

Sasha is legit standing like a guy from a video game😂

[Vasanthvdevskp]

Great teaching... Thanks for your wonderful lecture

[franciscocobos]

Great and simple video to help teams how to limit their WIP. Highly recommended! Btw, missing Chet Wrong videos, "The Wrong Way to do Agile", hilarious :-)

[timm]

There seems to be an obvious gap in explanation here. In the 4-6-2 WIP example, what happens when columns further to the right are holding things up due to their WIP limit? So testing is capped at 2, but developers complete another card but have nowhere to put it, and can't take a 7th card? It seems like there needs to be intermediate columns of backlog between each step in the workflow.

[kristinludlowUX]

You have specialists for a reason. Does it make sense to teach your devs how to design? Unless they have that specific skillset already, isn't this a problem for the quality of the work coming out of your design team? As a designer, I'm pretty sure they don't want me doing their dev work.

Small orgs w/ small teams on small projects need generalists. I get that, being I was one. But large orgs w/ large teams working on large projects will feel the impact of a poor user experience by cutting corners this way. You're just moving crappier work faster.