Glossary term
Work in progress
Work that has been started but has not yet reached a useful finished state.
Also known as: WIP, work-in-progress, WIP limit
Work in progress is everything a team has started but not finished.
High work in progress means people are splitting attention across more projects, handling more dependencies and switching context more often.
Starting additional work can make a team look busier while reducing how quickly individual pieces of work are completed.
Limiting work in progress forces a harder question: what needs to finish before something else starts?
