What's is WIP?
WIP is Working In Progress, it is how much work you started that did not finish it yet.
But why we have WIP? We have WIP because we are multitasking people. We need to finish many things, and the priorities of them can change over time
Why we have WIP?
In product development, the minimal WIP size would be N tasks if you have N developers. However, we going to increase this minimal number over time for many reasons:
The design is missing some workflow, so we are going to stop this task until the designer redo some of their work
Missing Design, missing API, and not a clear understanding of business logic can block developers and designers.
a more priority bug, enhancement or feature showed up
Problems caused by WIP
The older the WIP the more costly it is to keep up to date, as you switched your context, and you need some effort to catch up
Another problem with many WIPs is that your users/customers won’t benefit from it. It does not matter to them that you made 90% of that feature they wanna, they only care when the feature is released to them
When WIP is good?
A few WIPs are not bad, as you can use them to iterate many ideas, features, and blog posts over time.
WIP can happen in many places. I have many WIPs posts here at substack that I keep refining over time to always have new content to publish.
I’m trying to find the optimal number of WIP posts that I need to be able to publish are good post per week.
How to reduce WIP?
Only start a new task before finishing one WIP.
Reduce the task scope to finish faster.
Discard work that does not make sense anymore. For instance, a feature that no customers want anymore.
Don't forget to share if your friends that always start new side projects and don't finish any of them.
Nice post Sib. :) how did your WIP management evolve over time? was it bad before and how do you see it getting better?