Scrum Agile Project Management

The Definitive Talk on WIP: Stop Starting and Start Finishing

The definitive talk on Work in Progress (WIP) talks 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.

The presentation 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 visualization of work at a variety of levels in an enterprise and look at some of the lean constructs we can apply to limit work in progress; also delving into batch size, queuing theory and flow optimization to add further context.

Next, we will take a look at economic prioritization 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 organizational design and look at the perils of utilization-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.

Video producer: https://www.agileonthebeach.co.uk/