Member-only story
WIP Limits Are the Rule Nobody Follows
We set them, automated them, enforced them, and still failed. Here is what we actually learned.
Everyone knows about work-in-progress limits. Your board has them. Your retrospectives mention them. And nobody actually respects them. We had a limit of 2 items per developer. In practice, every single person on my team had 4, 5, sometimes 6 things bouncing around in progress. I was the worst offender.
So we got serious about it. We built automation. We set hard blocks. We made the limit impossible to ignore.
We still failed. And the failure was more interesting than the rule.
The Board Was Fiction
Two items per developer sounded reasonable when we set it. It looked good on paper. The problem was that it lived on paper. When a developer hit the limit, they’d move a card to “waiting on review” and pull in something new. When something felt stuck, they’d move the item to “blocked” and start something else instead. The Jira board became a parallel universe nobody actually lived in.
I watched this happen every day for months. And I told myself it was fine because people were “keeping busy.” That’s developer code for “I have no idea what I’m actually doing.”
