Whipping the WIP

Tom Breur

12 February 2017

“Don’t just stand there – do something!” Some agile notions are plain counterintuitive. Like: “Efficient systems require people to be idle on a regular basis”, “slack is necessary”, etc. And sometimes it can be (a lot) more productive doing “nothing” rather than “something”… A radical departure from scientific management. The Theory of Constraints (and Little’s Law) has taught us that WIP or “Work In Progress” taxes the system, makes it slower. If the burden is heavier than a system can handle, “just standing there” rather than “doing your job” can be more productive. As odd and counterintuitive as that may sound, let’s think for a moment, what else besides “just standing there” you might try if you are desperate to be “productive.”

Eli Goldratt (in The Goal) teaches us that one of the first things to do, after you have identified the bottleneck, is to attempt to exploit and elevate it. For knowledge work in teams, you invariably see that some person becomes a bottleneck. We’ll assume you have identified who that is. So if you are the bottleneck, you’d better be busy. 24/7. Assuming you are not, then what can you do? Exploiting the bottleneck comes down to taking away any work that others might do, because all of that is “pure” gain. What might appear counterintuitive is that if it takes someone else, besides your bottleneck, four times longer to accomplish the same effort, this is still a huge gain. Because every second you gain at the bottleneck is net progress. The fact this takes task someone else longer, even much longer, is completely irrelevant. This is how you “exploit” the bottleneck: make sure they are constantly working on tasks that are on the critical path to delivery, and every job they can hand off to someone else adds to the throughput.

After exploiting the bottleneck, the next step is to elevate it. This comes down to increasing its throughput, helping to enable your limiting process to produce more. You increase throughput, grow capacity per time unit. Sometimes the working process itself can be refined, sometimes tools or automation may help. Kaizen is a great way to research and experiment how you may enhance your capabilities.

Of course if you elevate the bottleneck far enough, at some point, a new bottleneck will show up somewhere else. That is both good and bad news. The good news is that you have taken care of your “old” bottleneck. The bad news is both that you may find out about this the hard way (a little bit too late), as well as that you now have another bottleneck to nurse. But at least you have acquired some practice how to handle it J