WIP and Priorization: Recommended Portions

Drinking from the Firehose cc. Chris Blakely

You’ve been hiking all morning and the mercury is nearing 100. You’re parched. You need water – lots of it.  But even in your thirst, you want that water to be manageable.

Which holds more water – a lake or a drinking glass?

Which will satisfy your thirst – a fire hose or a drinking fountain?

Whether it is water or work, limiting the portion size of something we are consuming actually makes it more useful. We do not lap from the pool or attempt to drink from the firehose’s blast.

In Lean, we limit work in progress (WIP) not just to slow people down and get them to focus, but to increase throughput. Standard procedure is to drink work from the proverbial firehose. All too often we try to do too much, too fast. And when we can’t, and our productivity suffers, we feel we’ve failed.

We have a throughput, our time is a finite resource. We are finite resources.

When we limit our WIP, we acknowledge this.

Pulling a task from our backlog into our WIP means that we are now using that very finite, very valuable resource. We want to make sure that the task we’ve chosen is of the highest importance.

Of course “highest importance” is contextual. Some days it’s work for a given client, other days it’s specific tasks, and still others it’s work that fits in the small time slots you have to work.

This isn’t just simple prioritizing of one thing over another. Your brain quickly picks up not only on your limited time but of the trade-offs that limited time generates.  You begin to conduct detailed risk assessments – naturally. I could do this large task for this client, or I could get these 10 little things off my plate – making me more able to focus tomorrow.  Or vice versa.

Personal Kanban helps uncover what is really causing the most stress. Those little unfinished tasks, or that big glaring responsibility.  We’re all wired slightly but appreciably differently. Our flow charts similarly have their quirks.