The Aging WIP Standup

There are several ways for teams to meet and plan their day. This event is known as the Daily Scrum, Daily Kanban or perhaps simply as the Standup. Here are a few of those ways:

  • Freeform: perhaps led by a manager, perhaps it’s just the team chatting. There is no real purpose or desired outcome other than conversation.
  • The 3 Questions: we all know of the 3 question standup (more here). It’s still extremely common and still extremely ineffective at creating a plan of attack for the day.
  • Walking the Board: A very effective technique which I discuss in detail in this article.
  • Aging WIP: the focus of this article. Read on to learn more about this highly effective method.

Benefits of Effective Standups

A. Improved Communication and Collaboration
One of the primary benefits of an effective Standup is improved communication and collaboration among team members.  By gathering together in a dedicated conversation, team members can share updates, exchange information, and clarify expectations of each other. This open and transparent communication fosters a sense of unity and helps prevent misunderstandings or duplication of effort.

The result of this conversation should be a shared understanding of the daily plan.  Everyone has a plan of attack for the day.

B. Enhanced Team Delivery
A well-executed Standup can significantly enhance teamwork. By discussing progress and upcoming needs, team members gain a clear understanding of how they will contribute to team level value delivery.

This shared knowledge promotes efficiency, reduces bottlenecks, and enables the team to collaborate on delivery of the highest value work items.

C. Focus on Finishing
At the end of the standup, the team should have expectations on what will be finished today.  This information can be useful to stakeholders and/or any downstream teams who may then accept the teams completed work items.  Downstream teams, and how to incorporate more of the value stream into this team, is beyond the scope of this article.

Stop starting, start finishing.

Aging WIP Technique

The first thing you need to do is to start visualizing the number of days a work item is in-progress. Start counting the moment work begins on an item. This is when a card is moved from a to-do type status into something perhaps like “doing” or “in progress” (as below).

Start the standup by addressing work items that have been in–progress the longest. Ask questions about delays or blockages. Discuss tactics to make progress on the item. Is an approval required? Does someone need help? Are higher priority items causing this item to be delayed? This conversation can expose problems with the process or policies about which items to work on at any given time.

Continue to discuss work items according to their days in-progress.

Benefits of an Aging WIP Focus

There are a number of benefits from paying attention to aging work items. By discussing the age of items daily in the standup you will keep the topic front of mind for everyone.

Improved Flow

The longer a work item is in progress the more likely it is to become blocked.

Blocked work items are harming your flow in several ways. They are taking up a WIP limit count when no progress is being made. Such constraints can easily become roadblocks to flow.

Dealing with blocked work takes time away from doing more important things, such as creating value.

Blocked items will likely skew your lead and cycle time metrics by creating a “long tail” when viewed as a histogram. Long tails will reduce the predictability of teams as you will not be able to predict when such items will disrupt flow in the future. This reduces the usefulness of forecasts generated from the metrics.

Aging WIP can be an indicator of “Flow Debt”

If you examine the cycle time chart below, you will notice 3 work items circled in red and 3 circled in green. This could be an indicator that a decision was made to put several work items on hold (circled in red) while expediting other work items (circled in green). The lower than usual cycle time of the items in the green circle may indicate tradeoff decisions were made or that they were included in an Expedite Class of Service (which disrupts WIP limits by adding 1 to the limits).

Making such tradeoff decisions can be thought of as incurring flow debt. This is when your policies or decisions take time away from items currently in progress to work on different work items. You are borrowing time from one item to use on another. Similar to technical debt, these are decisions made now which affect future work.

There is nothing inherently wrong with such policies or decisions. You should though be aware of the consequences of such actions. These “outliers” will now begin to skew the metrics and lower the predictability of the team/group.

A daily focus on aging WIP during Standup will expose these decisions and policies for further examination/consideration.

Examine your Cycle Time scatterplot

An examination of decisions to expedite certain items can lower the cycle time value used for forecasting at various percentile levels. Using the same data as above, the below chart on the left indicates that any future work item will complete in 12 days or less with a probability of 85%.

If decisions were not made to expedite certain items, those days would have been used to complete current WIP. The chart on the right would be the likely result of not incurring such flow debt. While remaining at the 85% probability rate, the expected days to complete a work item has dropped from 12 days to 10 days.

Improved Forecasting

Work items that are allowed to age, due to decisions, policies, blockers or unknowns, are all contributing to an increased average cycle time for all work items.

By addressing aging work items daily, the focus will be on trimming the delivery time for those items. This will help reduce the number of outliers and “tighten up” the cycle time chart. With a narrower band of cycle times, when viewed as a scatterplot, predictability of the team/group will improve.

When the range of actual values in cycle time lessens, meaning there are fewer “outliers”, the likelihood of those unexpectedly long cycle times occurring also drops. By improving processes, policies and decisions, the probability of surprises is reduced.

This increases the trust you can place in the forecasts generated using Lean metrics.

Use Your Tooling

It is beyond the scope of this article to configure various ALM tooling, such as ADO, Jira or VersionOne, to display such information but two recommendations:

  • Visualize the age of work items on the items. Turn cards a different color, or use some other form of decorator, to indicate aging work items. Perhaps use a smelly fish avatar.
  • Create an Aging chart that is reviewed frequently. Use this data to examine process, policies and other decisions which may be increasing the average work item age.

Wrapping Up

The Aging WIP standup can expose issues with the current ways of working. It can expose other problems within the system. By understanding the causes of increased cycle time the team can form better hypotheses when crafting change experiments.

Tightening up the flow of items reduces the number of outliers. This will increase the teams predictability and increase the level of trust which can be placed in forecasts created using this data.

All of these things are wins, simply by paying attention to work items that have been in the process longer than normal during Standup.

Focus on that Aging WIP. Don’t let work items become sour milk!

If you liked this post and want to learn more about Agile, Lean or Leadership, please consider purchasing a book from my Recommended Reading page.

Until next time!

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