Constant WIP Limits: A High-Risk, High-Reward Technique For Rapid Improvement
Phrases like continuous improvement or kaizen have made their way to almost every agile team, yet few ever really experience anything remotely like it. Instead, most people are put through meetings to discuss ways they might improve in the future, and things stay mostly the same. In this talk, I want to introduce a variation on WIP Limits that creates rapid improvement within a month of using this technique. Teams regularly show a 3x to 10x improvement in the speed of development, a significant improvement in quality, and claims of working at their absolute best. Unfortunately, these kinds of dramatic results come with huge risks that, if you aren't careful, could lead to 50% attrition in just a few months. In this talk, I'll go over this technique, how it works, how I introduce it, and how I recommend avoiding the risks.