[jkhdigital]

I think The Phoenix Project does a pretty good job of diagnosing the problem: in knowledge work, the WIP is generally not visible. Not only that, the WIP often consists of simply entries in a database or files on a hard drive, so there is effectively an infinite capacity for creating and storing more WIP.

Even with well-defined processes, poor instrumentation for revealing the true scale of the backlog at each stage can lead to this “always firefighting” mode of operation.