Kanban WIP Limit People

WIP Limit in Kanban

The WIP limit (Work In Progress) caps how many cards can sit in a Kanban column, or across the whole board, at any one moment. People often reach for a quick rule of thumb, WIP = people × factor, where the factor lands somewhere between 1.0 and 2.0 depending on how comfortable the team is juggling tasks and how much they need to lean on each other. What you are really after is focus and flow. Keeping everyone busy is not the point.

David J. Anderson laid out the technique in “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” (2010), and it draws on queueing theory. Little’s Law tells us that L = λW, or in plainer terms WIP = throughput × cycle time. Hold throughput steady and lower the WIP, and cycle time drops with it. If you have past data to work from, you can back into a starting WIP with WIP ≈ cycle time × throughput.

Applications

Software, support, marketing, and ops teams all reach for WIP limits when multitasking starts hurting more than helping. The cap drags bottlenecks into the open and makes delivery more predictable. You set them per column in tools like Jira, Trello (Power-Up), Linear, and Azure Boards. In Lean and DevOps shops, the WIP cap doubles as a kind of agreement between engineering and product, a way to keep product from dumping more work into the system than it can handle.

FAQ

What WIP factor should I start with? Somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 per person is a sensible first guess. Then watch your cycle time. If it keeps creeping up, your WIP is set too high.

Does WIP limit count blocked cards? It does. A blocked card still counts against your WIP, and that is by design. The team has to clear the blocker before pulling anything new.

Can I have global WIP or just per column? You can do either, and plenty of teams do both at once: a board-wide cap of, say, 12, sitting on top of column-level caps such as Doing = 5 and Review = 3. That mix gives you tighter control over where work piles up.