Limiting Work In Progress - Daniel Truemper

This resource first appeared in issue #47 on 23 Oct 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Prioritization

A trap research computing managers fall into fairly frequently (including me) is seeing the big picture, seeing all the things that need to get done, and trying to start them all at once. After all, we know about parallel computing, a wider pipeline can mean higher throughput, right? But human beings don’t work like that. You get more done by diligently limiting the amount of work in progress, which has the advantage that it requires prioritization.