Agile Superpower #2: Reduce WIP to the Most Important Work

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  

When agile teams master collaboration, that first agile superpower, they often discover they deliver more features faster. That’s great.

However, once the team starts delivering features faster, people ask more of the team. Managers, the product owner—everyone wants more from the team.

Worse, those people want more now. Even with collaboration, the team can’t deliver enough to satisfy those people if other people ask the team to do more and more.

That’s when the team needs to manage its WIP (work in progress) at several levels. Collaboration can solve the too-much WIP problem for each person and the team.

But what about when other people ask the team to increase either the number of features or the number of projects the team is supposed to complete? That requires assessing the value of those requests from other people at the product and portfolio levels.

Here’s what Sandra, an agile project manager, saw on her first day with a new team.

Throughput Decreases With Too Many Requests
Sandra walked into the team planning meeting on Monday at 3 p.m. So far, she’d spent her first day on the job filling out forms, meeting a wide variety of people, and learning what her boss, Manny, wanted.

He was clear: The team needed to deliver more features because it sold the product as a subscription, and it had been months since the team …

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