Have you ever watched your team struggle to deliver? Have you ever left the office feeling like you were running 100 miles an hour all day, but never got the well-deserved dopamine hit for getting something done? If so, you're not alone. But this new perspective can change all of that for you.

What is Work in Progress?

Work in Progress (WIP) refers to all tasks, projects, or items that have been started but not yet completed. (Can you literally count all the things that are currently in progress in your world?) It's the partially finished work moving through your system—whether that's code being developed, products being manufactured, or services being delivered. In flow theory, WIP is a critical factor that directly impacts throughput and lead times.

Global vs. Local Optimization

When we limit WIP, we're optimizing for the whole system rather than maximizing individual efficiency. As Goldratt emphasized: "Improving flow is a primary objective of every operation."

Consider this example:

Imagine you have 4 tasks, each requiring exactly 1 hour of focused work to complete. Instead of working on one task at a time until completion, you decide to multitask by working on each task for 15 minutes before rotating to the next one. How long will it take for each individual task to be completed?

The answer is 4 hours for each task. Since you're cycling through all tasks, each task only gets 15 minutes of work per hour. This means it takes 4 cycles (4 hours total) for any single task to receive its required 60 minutes of work. And importantly, all four tasks will finish at roughly the same time—after 4 hours—rather than having the first task complete after just 1 hour. If someone is waiting for you to get your job done before they can move on, you've just held up progress for downstream team members by an extra 6 total hours (three hours for task A, 2 hours for task B, and 1 hour for task C).

And in reality, it's probably worse than this, because as you task switch, you've got to get back into the train of thought you were in when you left the task the last time so it ends up taking you even longer than if you had just focused.

Who Struggles Most with WIP?

Certain roles face greater WIP challenges than others:

• Managers and Experts: These individuals are typically the constraints in your system—the resources with the least capacity relative to demand.
• Decision-Makers: Those who approve work or make critical decisions often become significant bottlenecks.
• People with Specialized Skills: Their unique expertise means they're often assigned to multiple projects simultaneously.
• Multi-Department Team Members: Anyone working across multiple departments often struggles with conflicting priorities.

One company I recently worked with went 7 straight years without finishing all of their strategic objectives. Not only is it sad, it's demoralizing for your team when they see these repeated failures in the organization.

WIP in Action: Business Examples

Software Development

Agile teams limit WIP by restricting the number of user stories in development at any time. This focus enables faster completion of individual features, earlier feedback, and prevents the quality issues that arise when developers context-switch between too many tasks.

Manufacturing Operations

Manufacturing facilities that limit WIP maintain smaller buffers between production stages and produce only what downstream processes can handle. This approach reduces inventory costs, shortens lead times, and makes quality issues immediately visible rather than hiding them in large batches.

Customer Service

Service teams that limit WIP handle fewer customer cases simultaneously but resolve each one faster and more thoroughly. This approach reduces the cognitive load on service agents, eliminates "forgotten" tickets, and dramatically improves customer satisfaction through faster resolution times.

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing departments that limit WIP focus on fewer campaigns with greater attention to detail and execution. This discipline leads to higher-quality campaigns, clearer measurement of results, and the ability to quickly incorporate learnings into subsequent efforts.

Executive Leadership

Executives who limit WIP focus their organizations on fewer strategic initiatives executed well rather than many initiatives executed poorly. This focus creates clarity throughout the organization, accelerates completion of high-priority work, and prevents the dilution of resources across too many competing priorities.

Implementing WIP Limits in Your Business

To harness the power of WIP limits:

1. Visualize your current workflow and identify where work accumulates. Seriously—just take some sticky notes, put them on the wall under the stages of your process. It will not take more than 15 minutes for you to figure out where the problem lies.
2. Establish appropriate WIP limits based on your constraints. As we covered in our Full-Kit article, ensuring all necessary components are available before starting work prevents the stop-start cycle that clogs flow.
3. Apply strategic triage to your current workload. Our Triage article explores how to make these critical decisions about which work to pursue, which to delay, and which to eliminate.
4. Measure lead times before and after implementing WIP limits to demonstrate the improvement.
5. Gradually reduce WIP limits to find your optimal flow. Your ideal WIP limit is based on the capacity of your system's constraints—typically your managers and experts.

In our next article, we'll explore the "Dosage" concept—how to apply resources more intensively to fewer projects for maximum flow.

The discipline of limiting WIP may feel counterintuitive at first—surely starting more work means completing more work? In reality, the opposite is true. By focusing on finishing rather than starting, you'll achieve faster delivery, higher quality, and greater responsiveness to changing priorities.