Total WIP limit for Status Group
complete
Björn Uppeke
It would be great if WIP limits could be set on entire Status Groups.
In Eric Brechner's book Agile Project Management with Kanban he talks about setting up Item Statuses in pairs. For each Status there is one column for Doing and one for Done. This would require Status Group WIP limits I assume.
Or can this setup be achieved in some other way?
Vidas
Björn Uppeke since we got finally around our heads and did this one. What would be your next biggest wishes in Teamhood's Kanban?
Vidas
complete
Vidas
Currently there is no way to share "wip limit" among columns, so yes, your idea is absolutely valid on how to solve this. On the other hand, I need to educate myself a bit on this shared WIP topic, in order to have a broader discussion whether this really makes sense. If a designer finished his job, why it should block him from taking onto new work even if developers did not pull in ready tasks? As I see it - such approach prevents piling up, but it also creates idling (not a bad thing in some cases), is that a desired tradeoff? Or is it only about lowering WIP and having better focus on tasks at hand?
Björn Uppeke
Vidas: As I understand the shared WIP limit is there to force the flow of tasks through the board. So yes, to prevent Done items from piling up. The author speaks about how the "designer" in your example should help out to complete tasks in the next step in order to unblock him/her to start working on new design tasks. See attached image from the book
Vidas
Björn Uppeke: for full stack / IT teams, probably makes some sense. Just from practical perspective, for me it is harder to understand how designer or any other vertical specialist can take over some piece of other specialists work, if it was that easy with vertical specialists, then the overall flow probably should be Todo/Doing/Done. And only "Doing" part would have WIP limit which is ideally equal or less than amount of specialists in the team. And if you are working in a conveyor fashion with flow from one specialist to another... it might mean that those people are specialized and can be hardly swaped. Sorry for going a bit of tangent but quite an interesting topic! I will educate myself a bit more on this and let's see what can be done from Teamhood side. I would guess if such queue columns would appear - next thing would be to calculate "queue time" to see how much time is wasted on work which does not move forward via flow?
Björn Uppeke
Vidas: Well in that case, I would say that the last bullet from the text in the book satisfies your scenario.
Vidas
Björn Uppeke: as a second best thing to do - yes. All in all, thank you for bringing this to our attention, it will be used during Kanban stream backlog refinement.