I talked recently about how many items in progress (WIP) we have and how lower is better. That’s absolutely true, and yet it’s not the whole picture. Of the items that are started, how many of those are actually being worked on?
In the chart below, we can see the total WIP per day grouped by whether it’s active (blue), stalled (light orange) or blocked (darker orange).
Stalled in this chart means that there has been no activity on the ticket in five days. No comments, no status changes, no subtasks moving. Most likely we haven’t had the time to work on these because we’ve been so busy with the few items in blue.
Blocked means that we can’t work on this because of some external dependency. Perhaps we’re waiting for a signoff, or an environment to become ready.
What we can see with this team is that with a WIP of roughly 15, only a few items are actually being worked on, on any given day, and this is typical in my experience. The higher the WIP is in total, the more of those items are stalled, or blocked.
The team I mentioned last week, with 227 items in progress, was adding value to almost none of those tickets. Almost everything was stalled.
The bottom line is that total WIP only tells us a part of the story. It tells us what’s started but not what’s actually being worked on at any time.
When the WIP is low, we can be fairly confident that all the started items are actually moving along. When the WIP is high, it only tells us that we’re busy, and little else.
Busy is not the same as effective. In fact, busyness and effectiveness are often inversely related. As we become better at one, we become worse at the other.
Starting work items that then just become stalled because we don’t have time to work on them, is not an improvement. That just creates waste and decreases our effectiveness.
Chart from JiraMetrics