Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about Agile within IT Services.  Many universities and companies are successfully using Agile to manage their IT projects.  Agile promises a number of benefits that are very appealing to IT Services.  In this post, I want to point out one of those benefits that have been mentioned in Agile seminars I’ve attended recently.  I encourage others to post additional information about Agile as well.

Reducing Work in Progress

Traditionally, organizations (including Miami) have assigned multiple projects to individuals or groups concurrently.  In fact, we list the ability to work on multiple projects concurrently as a preferred qualification in our job descriptions.  This is measured as a metric known as the “Work In progress” or WIP.  Currently, IT Service’s WIP is around 80.

The diagram below shows a very simplified visualization of this scenario with 6 different projects for 6 different clients.  (Of course, not all projects are the same size, start at the same time, end at the same time, etc. but I’ve created a simplified example for demonstration purposes.)

In this simplified example, the WIP would be 6 as there are 6 concurrent projects for this person/group.  Notice in this scenario, we’ve stretched all projects across our available resources – everyone gets a little piece of the available resources.  Each project gets 1/6th of the available resources.  Also note that all clients have to wait until the end to get benefit from any of the projects.

Agile promotes a reduction in the Work in Progress.  For any particular person or team, Agile recommends reducing WIP to one or as close as possible to one.

Below is the same simplified scenario but with a WIP of one.

In this scenario, we put 100% of our resources on a single project at a time.  This allows projects to complete much quicker (every month in this simplified case).

To the client waiting on Project 6, nothing is different – they still get use of their application on July 1. However, the clients waiting on the other 5 projects get benefit much sooner than they would have in the original scenario (as represented by the blue arrows).  In corporations, this could amount to millions of dollars in additional benefit.

In addition, studies have shown that people think they multi-task well, but in reality, they don’t.  Just like computers, there’s a significant loss for context switching between tasks.  Reducing the WIP to as close to one as possible reduces the number of context switches taking place with developers.

This is, of course, a simplified example.  In the real world, you have the issue of the mythical man-month to contend with as well as other potential issues that affect the outcome.  However, studies have shown that the benefits of reducing WIP and the other Agile practices can still be significant.