Work in progress (WIP)

Work in progress (WIP) refers to all tasks that a team has started but not yet finished. On a kanban board, WIP is everything sitting in active columns — typically In Progress and Review — but not in Backlog or Done.

Why WIP matters

The single most reliable predictor of how fast a team ships is how little work is in progress at once. Counterintuitively, teams ship faster when they finish things before starting new things — context-switching is brutal, and a half-finished task delivers zero value until it's complete.

This is why kanban introduces WIP limits: a hard cap on how many cards can sit in a given column at once. Common limits:

• In Progress: 1–3 cards per person, depending on the kind of work.
• Review: 2–3 cards total for the whole team. If reviews pile up, the bottleneck is review capacity, not building.

When a column hits its limit, no new work can enter it until existing cards move out. This forces the team to confront bottlenecks — which is the entire point.

WIP limits aren't a rule, they're a diagnostic

A team that hits its WIP limit and immediately raises it has missed the point. The limit is supposed to surface a problem. Maybe reviews are slow. Maybe a feature is harder than expected. Maybe someone is overcommitted. Raising the limit just hides the symptom.

The right response to a WIP-limit violation is a 5-minute conversation: what's blocked, and how do we unblock it?

How small teams should think about WIP

Small teams rarely formalize WIP limits with explicit numbers. Instead, the discipline is:

• One person, one task in active development at a time.
• Don't pull a new task while something is in review unless the review is genuinely blocked.
• Finish before starting.

How GritShip handles this

GritShip doesn't enforce hard WIP limits today — small teams generally self-regulate, and a hard limit can feel paternalistic. The board view does sort cards within a column by recency so the freshest work is visible at a glance, which surfaces stale in-progress work naturally. WIP-limit support is on the roadmap for teams that want to opt in.