Policy : Make Work Visible and Limit WIP

Commitment to Visual Flow and Focused Progress
You can’t improve what you can’t see. Making work visible-and actively managing how much of it is in progress-creates the foundation for fast, reliable delivery. By limiting work-in-progress (WIP), we reduce delays, focus effort, and improve predictability across teams and systems.

What This Means
We use visual systems (e.g. Kanban boards, dashboards, delivery metrics) to expose the flow of work from idea to value. We limit how much work is in motion at once to reduce multitasking, context switching, and incomplete handoffs. Teams manage flow consciously-not reactively.

Our commitment to visual flow and WIP limits is built on:

  • Work Visualisation at Every Level – Teams use visible boards, backlogs, and dashboards to show progress, bottlenecks, and blockers in real time.
  • Actively Managed WIP – We constrain how much work is started to ensure that more gets finished, improving focus and throughput.
  • Context Switching is a Cost – We treat multitasking as a delivery risk, not a productivity booster, and work to minimise it.
  • Flow-Based Delivery Reviews – We assess performance by looking at cycle time, flow efficiency, and where work gets stuck.
  • Shared Ownership of Flow Health – Everyone contributes to managing flow-not just delivery managers or scrum masters.

Why This Matters
When work piles up invisibly, delays grow, feedback slows, and predictability drops. Visibility creates clarity. Limiting WIP creates focus. Together, they enable teams to deliver value faster and with fewer surprises.

Our Expectation
All teams must visualise their delivery flow and actively manage WIP as part of their operating rhythm. Leaders must use flow data to support, not pressure-creating space for improvement rather than pushing for multitasking.

To support this policy, we will provide standards for flow visualisation, WIP management, and delivery system metrics. By making work visible and limiting WIP, we enable Better Value Sooner Safer Happier - focusing energy where it matters and accelerating value with control.

See Also

This policy is part of a cross-cutting concept. Read the full picture: → [[Flow and WIP]]

Related policies in other domains:

  • [[Design for Flow Efficiency]] — Lean
  • [[Minimise Dependency Drag]] — Leadership