Setting WIP limits is, for me, one of the least glamorous and at the same time most effective levers a team has. The idea fits into one sentence: you agree how many tasks may be in progress at once, and you only start something new when something else is finished. Sounds trivial. In practice, this single rule touches almost everything a team usually leaves unsaid: priorities, specialist knowledge, ownership and the question of who is actually allowed to say “no”.

I care about this topic because a full board looks so reassuring. Lots of work in progress feels like lots of progress. Often it is the opposite: every extra task stretches the waiting time of all the others, and at the end of the month a lot has been started and little has shipped. In this guide I show you how to arrive at sensible limits with your team in five steps, what to do when a limit is reached, and which mistakes are common.

In short

A WIP limit caps how many tasks a team works on at the same time.…