When I go into organisations adopting Kanban or advanced Agle, they often know that they should be limiting WIP (Work in Progress) or even are limiting WIP without really understanding why. I'm hoping to make that a bit clearer in this post. The main point of limiting WIP is that it reduces the average time taken to finish each Work Item - the Average Lead Time as I define it.
But why does Lead Time reduction matter. Well I think you might know that intuitively if not explicitly, but here it is -
The shorter the Lead Time is for a Work Item, the less EFFORT is needed to finish that Work Item.
That is pretty profound, and indeed may even be controversial but it is absolutely true. If you do the same work in a way that has high WIP and longer Lead Time, versus low WIP and short Lead Time, then it will take more effort.
Let me demonstrate at Kaizen Street
At KanbanDan's Garden Service. I have a contracts to maintain the lawns for the 12 almost identical houses in Kaizen Street, and for each my workers have to:
- Weed the lawn
- Mow the lawn
- Strim the lawn edge
I get paid £20 at the completion of each lawn by the homeowner. I have a team of 3 workers:
- Bob is an ace mower, he can also strim to an average level, but is slow at weeding
- Ian is an expert strummer, average weeder, but slower than average at mowing
- Flo is the best weeder, average at mowing and slow strimmer.
I have 3 mowers, 3 strimmers and 3 sets of weeding gloves and tools. Each lawn on the street is identical, so I know they take 60 minutes for one average person to weed, 30 minutes for one average person to strim, and 60 minutes for an average person to mow.
It takes 15 minutes to move the equipment from 1 location to another and set it up / store it on the van. At the start of the day and after lunch the first thing to do is unpack the gear. Last thing before lunch and at the end of the day, the gear must be packed onto the van for safety. It also takes 15 minutes to move the workers gear from one house to the next.
Lets assume that the most gardens I'm ever going to work on at once is less than or equal to the number of workers, so it's going to be 3 maximum. That may sound familiar as that is how many IT teams start limiting WIP, 1 work item per team member maximum.
So I have 2 options open to me. I could set each worker to work on a garden each, - the Maximised WIP solution, or I could have them swarm on 1 garden together - the Minimum WIP solution.
Lets consider the Max WIP "1 Garden per Worker" solution first:
On Monday morning at 9:15AM, Bob goes to number 1 Kaizen street, Ian takes number 2, and Flo takes number 3, they unload their gear and all start weeding, then when their weeding is done, they Strim, then they Mow the lawn.
At Lunch on day 1, my team of crack gardeners have finished 1 Garden but are well under way on 2 more, and have earned me £20
At the end of day 1, they have finished 4 gardens, and earned me £80
At lunch on day 2, they have finished 7 gardens and earned me £140, but have worked on 2 other gardens
At the end of day 2, they have finished 10 gardens and earned me £200, and wasted effort on 11 and 12 as they never got finished so never earned me any money.
Now for the Minimal WIP solution for the same problem
I ask the workers to all swarm on the first garden and get it finished. Each worker naturally plays to their strengths and does the jobs they are specialists in whenever they can. When there is no more work they can reasonably do, they move on to the next garden, but we have a WIP limit of 2 gardens. Even with that in mind, we try to work on the same garden together if we can. It's good for finishing gardens, but also good for the morale of the workers to be working together.
At lunch on day 1, they have finished 3 gardens and earned me £60
At the end of day 1, they have finished 6 gardens and earned me £120
At lunch on day 2, they have finished 9 gardens and earned me £180
At the end of day 2, they have finished all 12 gardens and earned me all of the available £240. Kaizen street has happy homeowners, and I have happy employees.
I'll attach my spreadsheet which shows who did what when, I always like to have the data to prove the science.
gardenTimes.pdf
So the net result is that the lower WIP lead to shorter Avg Lead Time per garden, and resulted in less effort being spent to achieve the same work completed, and therefore earlier delivery of value and more completed work in the same time period. You could add in that Bob, Ian and Flo are treated like people in the minimum WIP version rather than resources - they got to specialise in their area of mastery whenever possible, and got to work together in the same garden for a lot of the time. That is likely to lead to a happier workforce which tends to lead to lower turnover, and easier recruitment (Bob, Ian and Flo are telling their friends how much they enjoy working here and those friends want to come and work with me too).
Now lets stretch the metaphor… lets imagine we live in a country where we have unpredictable weather (not a big stretch in the UK) and it rains on day 2 so we cannot go to work. In the high WIP method we only finished 4 houses and earned a paltry £80. Most of the value in that method gets delivered on day 2, which never happens. In the minimal WIP method we would have finished 6 houses and earned £120 - thats 75% more value released after day 1 in this scenario. Plus we have unhappy customers with half finished gardens.
I'm sure you're asking yourself how the rain equates to something in the IT world, but I'm sure we've all had days of lost work where networks have failed, the SAN ran out of DISK, the Build Server went belly up or similar. Work in Flight is actually a liability rather than a benefit - it has cost but no value, it only becomes a benefit when it completes and releases its value. We need to shift the focus on the Output of our systems, not the utilisation of our resources within the system. In this case the focus is on finished gardens, not working on gardens.
It seems like a magic trick, but there is nothing up my sleeves here - this is just Kanban in action.
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