Reducing WIP (Work In Progress) is super easy. Anybody can do it.
The solution is not the problem, accepting that it's the solution is THE problem. It’s also a question of who is most vocal (and annoying) about their experienced misery.
A low WIP will swiftly make your stakeholders feel miserable. They feel like you're not making progress and delaying valuable things. It gives off the impression the team is moving at glacial speed. They don’t likey and you will hear it.
High WIP, on the other hand, makes your stakeholders feel great. Everything seems to be moving. The teams are sweating and working their butts off. This is what solid progress looks like, with everyone programming their assess off.
The problem is that a high WIP creates the illusion of progress. You look lightning fast on paper because you’re working on many things at once. It feels like lightning in a bottle, but you actually have ten glaciers slowly moving at the same time.
There are two choices you can make:
1) Feel great by picking up too much work. Nobody feels any pain (except the people doing the work). It feels like you’re moving fast and you’re losing nothing. All the misery is delayed misery, you can deal with that later.
2) Feel terrible because you must embrace the misery of your stakeholders immediately. Accept the sting of not picking up work now. You will feel that pain immediately. It sucks. It immediately feels like you’re losing and moving slow.
The problem with 1 is that on paper you lose nothing. By the time you do notice the problems, it’s often many months later.
By the time stuff falls off, everybody will have forgotten the silent assassin of our progress: high WIP.
But hey, at least we didn’t have to say no to anything. Shit happened and the decision what fell off was made for us.
Do you want work to move fast or have the illusion of speed because everyone seems busy all the time?
Do you want immediate false misery or delayed true misery?
It’s like not exercising for many years. It’s easy to do and you will delay your misery. The alternative is to try to escape your delayed misery: lower your WIP and make time to go to the gym.
Great piece! I keep telling people that the idea of “up fronting disappointment” tends to win on the long run. But like you referred: when the problems emerge, maybe sufficiently has changed anyway and no one really cares.
Interesting enough, my own piece coming out later today also mentions Limiting WIP as an example of dealing with things on an oblique (indirect) way: so to foster conversations about priorities. But as your piece so well explained: you got a first move away from that sort of aura misery with stakeholders.