Performance

When examining real workflow data, there’s a common pattern: clusters of tasks that have aged significantly, some clearly stagnating beyond recognition acceptable timeframes. These cases point to one of the most important yet very often overlooked metrics in flow management: WIP Aging. WIP (Work In Progress) Aging measures the elapsed time that a work item has spent in active progress but remains incomplete. This metric serves as an early warning system for workflow problems, helping teams identify where work gets stuck before it significantly impacts delivery timelines. Unlike cycle time, which analyzes completed tasks retrospectively, WIP Aging provides real-time visibility into current work, making it the single most actionable metric for proactive flow management. ...

TL;DR: Once you can read Throughput, you can use it for probabilistic forecasting. Monte Carlo Simulation turns historical completed work into ranges, percentiles, and a better conversation about delivery risk. This is a follow-up to the Throughput article. If you need the foundation first, start with Throughput: the flow metric behind team predictability. Here I will not re-explain the metric. Here we turn historical completed work into a forecast. Now let’s get to the practical question management loves to ask: “When will this project of X items be done?” ...

Product is crafted by people. It is not a sum of collaborative work. It’s usually a combination of work, excitement, collaborative ideas, feedback loop inside the team throughout the whole project lifecycle. Passion is right at the heart of every person, and if environment tends to motivate - a person will work hard to achieve a good result (appreciated by the team and himself). Moreover, working with passionate team amplifies the overall product, makes it bigger than sum of efforts. ...

7 years ago Apple announced that they would be moving from PowerPCs to Intel’s x86 CPUs in two years because they had been producing less heat and running much faster (PowerPCs were built by IBM. The 8-core version of this chip also powers PlayStation 3 ). This was a very dangerous step, which definitely brought massive boost in performance for Apple products, but caused additional emulation layer to run the legacy applications. ...