[TipsForCanoes]

> "WIP" does not work

Such a bold statement when you must know that countless people have a very different experience. Kanban the team methodology is about process efficiency and avoiding bottlenecks.

WIP limits are triggers to redirect resources to the bottleneck is that causes the pileup. Example: If there is pileup of PRs needing review, that is the trigger for devs on the team to stop making new PRs and switch to doing reviews.

Kanban is certainly not the best methodology for all team tasks but where it fits it works very well.

Sadly, for a lot of teams "we are doing kanban" means nothing more than "we are using a task board with columns" or worse "we have no constraints or flow controls and do everything ad hoc."

[okovooo]

Yes, many people disagree with me. Take this as an assumption that I'm checking in my service. Of course, it is necessary to limit the amount of work, but in my opinion, WIP per column does not work. Therefore, I have implemented limits only for the entire kanban board (process).

[TipsForCanoes]

I'm curious exactly what you found not to work. How was your manager using the WIP constraints and triggers, that you didn't like?

I ask because in my experience the main 2 reasons are either a manager who doesn't understand the kanban methodology and uses it incorrectly or that it simply doesn't benefit the workload of the team trying to use it.

[okovooo]

In recent years, I've been working in 2-4 teams at the same time. Each team has its own manager, and every year one or two teams changed managers for different reasons. This gave me the opportunity to work with different people, but not a single case of successful introduction of WIP limits. It's not because someone didn't understand how to work with WIP. It just didn't have a permanent effect. For a change, it's worth trying different tools, I think it's useful for a good atmosphere in the team.

[TipsForCanoes]

Could you do me a favor and just explain what you found not to work?

[okovooo]

I think it's because the complexity of the tasks varies, and it's also difficult to predict this complexity.

[TipsForCanoes]

> I think it's because the complexity of the tasks varies, and it's also difficult to predict this complexity.

I don't know what that means in relation to the Kanban methodology.

What I'm looking for is something like, "my manager attempted to improve our cycle time by introducing limits on the number of tasks that can be in each state on our board. When a limit is exceeded, we are expected to take a predefined action to help clear the bottleneck that caused the pile up. It doesn't work and we still have bottlenecks and have not improved cycle time or efficiency."

If all your manager is doing is putting arbitrarily limits on WIP columns, that's unlikely to accomplish much and thats not Kanban. This kind of limit is only beneficial for the person who starts too many tasks without finishing them. The Kanban methodology is about team efficiency, not individual task limits.

edit: typos