Has adding WIP limits increased conflicts in your team? Are your developers and testers always in conflict with each other despite having a kanban board? Does your team think limiting WIP is not practical?. If you answered yes to any of these questions, this session is for you.

This is a story of a team that implemented WIP limits, only to find that conflicts can arise when there is no true pull mechanism.  Pull system does not just mean that people assign work to themselves in the sprint planning.  It means a lot more than that.

In this experience report, I present the ups and downs faced by the team when they experimented with WIP limits and their way forward.

Is your agile transformation just another restructure?  Is everyone being shuffled around into Tribes?  Villages?  Crews?  Are people reporting horizontally into Chapters?  Is there talk of how we need to go faster?  Were decisions made behind closed doors?  Was the focus on structure as if that will change everything?  Consultants engaged who created lots of PowerPoint presentations with lovely motherhood statements about how our people are our greatest asset and the new structure will break down silos and allow us to go faster?

Then it’s announced, teams are shuffled around into squads, tribes, chapters, etc..  As the transformation builds up speed, everyone gets some training and there is a massive amount of change management comms, presentations, and events.

Big up front plans,… Big bang change,… Heavy Change Management,… Does that sound like waterfall?

In this talk we’ll discuss a better way by actually being agile about the way we approach agile!