The team could have decided to simply clear out the existing WIP piles, and that activity alone would have perhaps highlighted some problems with the value stream etc. But we went further: the introduction of WIP limits was an attempt to get at the /causes/ of those WIP piles and prevent them building up again.

And this is a strong, dynamic team; in 6 months they will certainly have moved their process forward again.

I’m wondering whether, in six months time (when the team is mature with this) another change of approach/board-layout will reveal other issues.

The team initially decided to try WIP limits because the last couple of columns on their XP-style story board were bulging with cards for which no-one seemed responsible. During our early discussions about making the transition, we decided that those columns’ WIP limits should be set lower than the current number of cards there; so a cleansing exercise was called for. At that point, we began hearing conversations such as:

“I’m sure this one has already been signed off in Beta?” — “Yeah, but it hasn’t yet been deployed to live, so we left it here.”

It quickly became clear that there were columns missing from the story board, and so I decided that we needed to start from scratch and make sure we had a clean, clear value stream before anything else happened.