Is WIP holding your team back?

I was asked yesterday about what to do when all the work in progress (WIP) items on a board did not fit what a team member could work on. The leader was wondering what to do since currently their solution is to find something else the person can work on and pull that in. Here is one of those scenarios where many popular Agile methodologies smack right into the wall of reality.

So I asked the leader if they had brought this up during the next time the team gathered together? “What can we do about this?”. Personally, I find this to be a powerful question. The team is empowered to reflect and come up with their own solutions.

Some possible options they might come up with could be:

• Training / Cross-training for the team member who always seems to run out of ways to contribute
• Breaking down the tasks further so more people on the team can contribute
• Pairing up team members or grouping them to swarm on a task
• Talk about what is blocking that team member – Is it skills? Dependencies outside the group? Are they a specialist who can only do one part of a task (design, testing, a niche development skill, etc)? or is something else happening?
• Does the current WIP limit work for the team?
• Is the team pulling in the best mix of tasks?

The goal here isn’t for them to come up with some perfect answer. It’s to empower them to identify and solve the blocks together. What I try to coach my teams to do is to reflect and share ideas with each other then determine a way forward. They often come up with things I would not have and it makes their time at work more meaningful.