Do you or your team ever feel like you have too many projects going simultaneously to ever finish any of them? This was a constant struggle for me at one time, until I learned about pull systems, a different way of managing work than the traditional “take orders and start everything” approach. In a pull system, constraints are set for a maximum number of works in progress (WIP), like projects. When one project finishes, a team or person is free to pull another from a backlog and start on it, but can never exceed the maximum number works in progress at any given time.

With the support of my leadership team, I was able to implement a pull system in an IT department I led. We chose to use a simple kanban system, which is a visual card system developed by Toyota to manage work. Our initial goal was to identify all the work we had in progress using three categories of work… To Do, Doing, and Done. We simply drew three columns on a whiteboard and then wrote down each thing we were working on or knew we would be working on on a sticky note and put it in the appropriate column. It was an eye-opening experience. Between three people we had 43 projects going and knew that we could really only handle two maximum per person due to all the other duties our team had to complete (like system maintenance, support escalations, etc.).

Our next step was to take this information to leadership and discuss the number of works in progress and get it down to a manageable level so that our team could actually complete work it was assigned instead of just starting it. With approval, we were able to drop down to a lower number of projects in progress, forcing us to prioritize, with leadership, what work was already in progress. We invited them in the whiteboard room and went through each project. If it did not have to get done now, we moved the sticky note to the To Do column. This got us down to 28 sticky notes/works in progress. Still too many.

We reassessed our WIPs by asking three questions:

1. Does this align with our mission, vision, and purpose? This immediately eliminated six items.
2. Does this create meaningful value for customers or the organization? After some healthy debate, seven more were removed.
3. What happens if we stop working on this? For three items, the answer was “nothing.”

This exercise left us with 12 WIPs. It was still too many, but it was a start. Next, we asked “how close is this to being done?” If a WIP could be completed in 20 hours or less, we kept it as a WIP. This left us with seven projects to finish up and a clear definition of what to focus on over the next few weeks. Within a few weeks, we closed seven projects, more than we had completed in any single year over the previous five years. Leadership was happy, and the team’s stress level dropped noticeably.

Over the years, I’ve moved from a whiteboard to using exact same kanban in Microsoft Planner and other Microsoft 365 tools, and a more advanced scorecard with the questions we asked, plus more.

Overall, I learned that finishing fewer things faster creates more value than starting everything.

Next week, I’ll provide instructions on how to build a simple kanban in Planner and we will wrap up this series with building a WIP scorecard to help you decide what your team should be working on.

PS: If you want help using Microsoft Planner or Whiteboard to manage work with a pull system, reply to this email and let’s explore your options.
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Perry Myers
​The Outlier Team​