What Should Your Team Do Now, Next and Never? How to Reduce Work in Progress

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

Many agile teams struggle with too much WIP, work in progress. They might have overcommitted to work they thought they could finish. Or their managers asked them to multitask. That multitasking caused the team to miss their expected time commitments. (And let's remember many of these teams also must solve production support problems.)

All these "commitments" lead to too much WIP and no way to "catch up." Everyone feels overwhelmed.

Many teams then try to replan for the next iteration or the next batch of stories. Instead, consider a one-hour workshop to ask what to do now, next and never. The answers to those questions will help the team reduce its WIP and start increasing throughput.

After the one-hour workshop, plan for the shortest possible time and re-evaluate the WIP.

Organize the Workshop
If you are all in one location, get a big conference room with a large table or sufficient walls. Your job is to bring many index cards and dark markers. 

If you have a distributed team, conduct the workshop virtually using online tools. Make sure the team has access to a shared board for the cards.

If your team uses a physical board, bring that board into the room. But if your team uses an electronic board, find a way to expose that electronic board in the meeting room so everyone can see it. The current team board is for reference, not …

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