Organizational WIP

Let’s talk about organizational WIP. Some of the organizations I have met are surprised to see that although they are trying to maintain WIP at team level it is almost impossible to maintain the WIP they have defined without affecting the requirements at the portfolio level. One of the reasons is that the organization does not ask itself what the true capacity of the teams is and if there is a true relation between the expectations and the teams’ capacity. One may say this is a generic conflict. In most cases it is. However, defining an organizational WIP (e.g. number of projects that can be concurrently developed) that is based on true capacity may reduce this conflict and make more realistic plans.