Limiting Work in Progress Workshop

Consider the cycle time chart below.  This chart shows how long it took a team to finish work that was assigned to their team. The peaks - or when the team was the slowest - were when they were operating under a business-as-usual mode. They had a lot of work in progress.

 

But here is where it gets interesting. Whenever the team had an emergency, they dropped everything and worked on that emergency. Their cycle time went down, and they got work done faster.

 

As soon as the emergency was over, they resumed working on several projects simultaneously, and delivery slowed to a crawl.