What is WIP?
WIP (Work in Progress) is the amount of work items that have been started but not yet finished. In Kanban, limiting WIP is one of the most powerful practices: by restricting how many things the team can have "in progress" at the same time, it forces focus on finishing before starting — and flow improves dramatically.
In practice
On a Kanban board, every intermediate column gets an explicit limit: for example, "In development (limit 3)". If the limit is reached, nobody picks up a new item until someone frees space by finishing one. This exposes bottlenecks immediately: the column that is always full shows where the system problem lives. Teams that adopt WIP limits see lead time drop, rework decrease and the general sense of chaos go down, because people switch context fewer times a day. K21's KMP is the first step for teams that want to apply Kanban with real WIP limits.
What happens when it is missing
Without WIP limits, the team starts everything that shows up. People jump from task to task, each item takes far longer than needed because of context switching, and nothing finishes on the agreed date. Stakeholders get anxious because "everything is in progress, but nothing is done" — which is exactly the problem WIP limits are designed to solve.
Related terms
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