Scaling your WIP Limits Can Unlock Organizational Agility

Today, it’s not uncommon for teams in large organizations to be inundated with requests from enterprise stakeholders, leadership, and anyone other than customers. These requests take the form of mandates to ensure compliance with various standards as they relate to information security, architecture, and other areas that position teams to be “well-managed”. The requests often pile up like traffic on Los Angeles’ Harbor Freeway at rush hour, pre-covid, of course. The end result is that this work takes priority, steamrolling all the product-lead development requirements, and therefore squashes any sort of agility, incremental delivery, or addition of customer value. Tackling any sort of angle as it relates to “organizational agility” is no easy feat. It takes a certain prowess to stand up to leadership and those who sign the checks to tell them “no” or “not now”. It certainly is difficult to tell them we need to limit the amount of work the teams take on. Throughout this talk, the speakers will share a story related to the aforementioned Harbor Freeway, propose a solution to those traffic woes, and then discuss how we can apply a similar concept to software development and those nasty mandates at an organizational level. The speakers will share the success story of how they managed to implement a similar approach at Capital One, and illustrate how you can too.