When Too Much Work in Progress (WIP) Slows Down Your Flow Efficiency

A few years ago, growth was about hiring more people. Today, growth is about efficiency—doing more with less. As an Engineering Leader, you must align your teams to achieve business goals while improving efficiency. Not every organization has the luxury of hiring more people, so what do we do? We capture each source of inefficiency and thrive on removing them.

After working with several organizations over the years, we have noticed common pitfalls that slow teams down. More importantly, we prepared a list of recommendations to avoid them.

Working on Too Many Items at Once

When everyone is busy, we think we’re going faster when we’re going slower. Everything progresses slowly, and the customer receives the value later. This also increases the cost of delay. When the WIP is higher, items are waiting, creating more opportunities for handoffs and leading to longer market time.

How to Spot The Trend?

Follow the team’s WIP and compare it to the number of team contributors. Is the trend stable? Do we tend to start more things, or do we tend to start fewer things?

You can also follow the stability of your workflow or a cumulative flow diagram. The mantra is “Stop starting, start finishing.” Inspect if you start significantly more items than you complete. Do you complete all items at the end of the sprint in a big batch, or does it feel more like a continuous flow?

Solution

• Reduce the team’s WIP. It feels counterintuitive but leads to a shorter cycle time and higher throughput.
  • If you don’t know how to set a WIP limit, while there are many articles on that subject, you could start with a limit of the number of contributors in the team minus 1. It will impose a first form of collaboration.
• Focus on items, not individuals.
  • Don’t assign items to individuals.
  • Focus on the closest item to completion and assign a duo or trio of people to complete it before starting a new task. This will naturally reduce WIP and allow you to capture the value faster.
  • Things wait because you wait for people to be available. You don’t need to wait for others if you work together. It will significantly increase your flow efficiency and lead to a better performance.

How to Get Started

The first step is to start measuring yourself. The first set of metrics I suggest gathering is the DORA metrics. This will give you a first picture of the team’s delivery performance and let you know which teams need more attention from the pack. 

Setting up Your DORA Metrics Dashboard

Tools such as Axify integrate seamlessly with your tech stack to collect accurate data at all phases of development. Our DORA metrics dashboard tracks Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate and Failed Deployment Recovery Time. It allows teams to compare their performance with industry benchmarks, past performance, and other teams in the same organization to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes.

Comparing Your Teams’ Delivery Performance

Our teams’ insights allow you to visualize DORA metrics for each team. They offer the advantage of comparing apples to apples on two important engineering efficiency factors: speed and stability. You can quickly see which team could benefit from more attention and which could share their best practices for better performance.

Working Toward Continuous Improvement

Transform how your team sets and achieves goals with our objective and key results tracking tool. See immediately the evolution of your performance indicators and implement initiatives that support the continuous improvement of your development team.

Contact us for more information on how Axify helps development teams measure DORA KPIs and improve engineering efficiency, or request a demo.

More Pitfalls to Avoid for Maximum Software Engineering Efficiency

1. Pull requests are stuck or taking too long to review
2. Working items are too big
3. Quality control is long due to a lack of automation
4. Bad allocation of time investment

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