I’ve known for a long time that controlling Work-in-Progress (WIP) is important, but I didn’t realize the fundamental relationship that WIP has to Throughput and Cycle time until I read “The Phoenix Project”.
It’s summarized in Little’s Law, which is a very accessible little piece of math, that handily describes the way one thing goes up when another goes down, and vice versa.
Bottom line? Your software develop systems are a process. So ask yourself, what are you optimizing that process for? Most people want to “get a lot done”. Well, the counterintuitive finding of Little’s Law is that doing less (at a time) actually helps you deliver more.