Imagine an instance where it is taking you or your team longer than anticipated to finish work. A new request comes in. Given your current turnaround times, you might intuitively chose to get started on the new item as early as you can and give yourself a chance to complete it on time, even if it adds to your workload.

If this resonates with you, this post was written especially for you. By adding more items to your workload, you extend the duration it will take to complete it. This unravels into an unsustainable cycle when more work inevitably comes in. As you concentrate on frenetically completing tasks, you lose focus of the bigger picture and miss opportunities to rectify the cumulative work. If the speed of delivery suffers, it ultimately threatens work quality, revenues, team morale and stakeholder credibility.

This Busy Bee Paradox is substantiated by a theorem called Little’s Law. Little’s Law calculates how long it takes to finish work given how much work you complete and your work in progress.

The key implication of Little’s Law is that you need to work on less items if you want to work faster. If it takes you too long to complete your scope of work, you should break it down into smaller, more manageable items and focus exclusively on these. In short, Little Law gives you all the justification you ever needed to refocus. If leaders want to utilize their teams to their full potential and enable them to deliver higher quality work faster than ever before, they should implement a limit on the number of items that the team will work on at any given time, so that the team can focus on the current work in progress.

Limiting work in progress allows existing work to be finished before starting new work. This is a key component of the Kanban method and is arguably its single most underappreciated quality. It puts people first and protects individuals from being unecessarily overwhelmed. It also benefits the company by giving team members time to cope with the complexity of their work, to improve processes and to collaborate and synergize with peers and partners. Finally, it moderates any order-taker dynamic with stakeholders: having a workload limit helps you decide when to start new work. If you would like more insight around the benefits of moving away from accepting and fast-tracking impromptu requests, I highly recommend Daniel Vacanti’s fascinating explanation of how an expedite request sunk the Titanic.

For Kanban to be succesful, the flow of work needs to be actively managed beyond merely limiting work in progress. I shall dedicate another post on how to optimize the flow of work, but I will conclude this one with a couple of teasers:

• Once you have stabilised your workflow, Kanban can save work estimation time with its forecasting techniques. It also puts you in the safest position to answer the inevitable stakeholder question of “when do you expect to finish the work?”, in a language that they understand (as opposed to story-point estimations, for example).
• Kanban can also combine its great practices to those of Scrum. When this is achieved, Scrum with Kanban turbo charges the creation of valuable solutions for customers and enable businesses to succeed in their complex environments.