![]() ![]() Improve team’s autonomy: teams should be autonomous to complete a task. Improve the team's technical practices: practices like trunk-based development, automatic testing, or continuous delivery improve the software delivery performance, so the throughput will increase. However, there are some decisions that can improve this throughput in the long term. There are no immediate actions that produce a better team performance. While the current amount of work in progress can be reduced instantly, increasing the team's throughput is not as simple. ![]() Example: the number of tasks a team can complete on a weekly basis. In Kanban, throughput refers to the amount of work delivered over a certain period of time. As we said, our goal is to complete the task as soon as possible, not to start as many as possible. Instead of assigning one task to each developer, try to solve the problem together. Pair / Mob programming: pair/mob programming is also an excellent approach for reducing WIP. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. Steve Jobs said: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. Otherwise, we will have a never-ending backlog and a lot of pressure to start new work. How to reduce WIPĭo fewer things: this may look obvious, but it forces us to make decisions and discard some ideas. We want to stop starting and start finishing. We don’t want resource optimization, we want to optimize the flow in the queue. With Little’s Law, we have mathematical proof that reducing WIP is a better strategy if we want to finish our work early. In fact, any other decision seems counterintuitive. We usually have the goal of having everyone busy, and any other choice is considered ineffective. Instead, all people should help to finish the ongoing work.Īs John Cutler explains here, limiting WIP is hard. If the WIP limit is reached, nobody is allowed to start new work. When we set a WIP limit, we are forced to prioritize and select the tasks to implement. Work in progress (WIP) refers to the work that has been started but not yet finished. Throughput is the average amount of work a team can complete in a certain period of timeįrom the formula, we can see that we have two options to improve lead time: reduce the amount of work in progress or increase the throughput.WIP is the average number of in-progress tasks.Lead time is the average time a task spends in the backlog.The average team’s delivery lead time is the number of work-in-progress tasks divided by its throughput. Considering the product backlog as our stationary system, we could define the Little’s Law as: In this article, we will focus on the last use case: the number of user stories in a product backlog. Number of user stories in a product backlog.“The long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer spends in the system.”. In this article, we will explore Little's Law, a mathematical theory that relates lead time to the amount of work in progress and to the team's throughput. Expect results and you will get them.Improving the delivery lead time is a goal for every organization. You will hear all kinds of excuses, as we have heard. We do have clients who have reduced their total investment in WIP and AR to less than 30 days, so we know it is achievable. Assign a firm administrator or collections person to help with calling clients, working with your billers, supplying copies of invoices, picking up checks, etc.This will enable them to move forward on your new plan of retainer and progress billing. Have serious conversations with any client whose AR balances are more than 30 days past due and get a note payment schedule in place for the past due amounts.Set up a process in your firm to make sure this happens. Ask tax compliance clients to pay in advance or immediately upon delivery.Insist on an advance retainer and a progress payment schedule for all work done in the new year.Communicate with slow paying clients about your new policy.Let all your partners, managers and billers know that you are serious with this plan by setting weekly targets and monitoring them diligently.If you are having difficulty in this area, here are a few things you can do: We have been working with all of our clients to reduce their investments in WIP and AR to less than 45 days of net fee revenue. The first signs of a client’s financial trouble will begin showing up in your WIP and AR.įirms that allow their WIP to go unbilled for weeks and their AR to grow to over 60 days are poorly managing their resources. The following are excerpts from an article by Troy Waugh, “Be a Bear in This Bear Market.” Source: Monthly Memo from The Rainmaker Consulting Group ![]()
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