Today, I read the legendary article Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, an excellent summary of knowledge from Henry Ford, Taiichi Ohno and Eliyahu Goldratt.
This series of short articles I am writing sometimes has little explicit action to take based on the content of the art. I agree. Sometimes it is a single thought.
The best takeaway from this art is an opportunity to read the article by Goldratt linked at the beginning. I believe going through that may help to understand many "whys" behind what we do in IT. Like limiting WIP and making it visible, looking for teams that become a bottleneck/constraint, dealing with local vs global optimizations, avoiding over-production in UI Design or improving the dynamics of stream-aligned teams with enabling and platform ones. In the linked article, I see many inspirations for such aspects.
Getting back to your question on the semantics of Progress vs Process. I have never heard anyone in IT saying "Work In Process". The last time I heard it was about 10 years ago when I was building software for managing manufacturing lines.
In my opinion, "Work In Process" more clearly describes everything that happens since we start work on something until it's completely done.
"Work In Progress" on the other hand, is very attached to In Progress column in Jira in the default way of thinking about it. When talking to many engineers and product managers, I often experienced the way of WIP count and cycle time calculations based on the time the issue spends just in "In Progress" column. That usually leads to exceeding the WIP count in all the columns between In Progress and Done; to saying "it is almost Done" when referring to the plan of moving an issue from "In Progress" to a later stage (e.g. code review). I heard, "It is not WIP; it is in QA".
Goldratt's article made me think - if we used "Work In Process" to name that, it would be much easier to describe what WIP count is and what cycle time is because of detaching our thinking just from the default "In Progress" Jira column to move the attention to the more broad process.
And once again, thank you for the comment! It made me re-think the content of this art, so I shortened it by half. :)
Not sure what to take away from this post. Do you see an important semantic different between process and progress with regards to WIP?
Thank you for the comment Paulo!
This series of short articles I am writing sometimes has little explicit action to take based on the content of the art. I agree. Sometimes it is a single thought.
The best takeaway from this art is an opportunity to read the article by Goldratt linked at the beginning. I believe going through that may help to understand many "whys" behind what we do in IT. Like limiting WIP and making it visible, looking for teams that become a bottleneck/constraint, dealing with local vs global optimizations, avoiding over-production in UI Design or improving the dynamics of stream-aligned teams with enabling and platform ones. In the linked article, I see many inspirations for such aspects.
Getting back to your question on the semantics of Progress vs Process. I have never heard anyone in IT saying "Work In Process". The last time I heard it was about 10 years ago when I was building software for managing manufacturing lines.
In my opinion, "Work In Process" more clearly describes everything that happens since we start work on something until it's completely done.
"Work In Progress" on the other hand, is very attached to In Progress column in Jira in the default way of thinking about it. When talking to many engineers and product managers, I often experienced the way of WIP count and cycle time calculations based on the time the issue spends just in "In Progress" column. That usually leads to exceeding the WIP count in all the columns between In Progress and Done; to saying "it is almost Done" when referring to the plan of moving an issue from "In Progress" to a later stage (e.g. code review). I heard, "It is not WIP; it is in QA".
Goldratt's article made me think - if we used "Work In Process" to name that, it would be much easier to describe what WIP count is and what cycle time is because of detaching our thinking just from the default "In Progress" Jira column to move the attention to the more broad process.
And once again, thank you for the comment! It made me re-think the content of this art, so I shortened it by half. :)
Thanks for elaborating. And it makes sense! 🙂