make-work-visible

Start with WIP of 2 or less per person and team size times 1.5 per team, so a team of four gets six cards in Doing. Post limits on column headers, enforce them strictly, and adjust empirically: lower until flow improves, raise only if the team starves.

The Five Thieves are too much WIP, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities, and neglected work. Each has distinct symptoms and countermeasures, such as WIP limits for overload and age tracking with forced finish-kill-escalate decisions for neglected cards.

Walk the board right to left, starting closest to Done, and ask three questions per card: what is blocking it, what is needed to move it, and has it aged. Skip the per-person yesterday-today round-robin since the board already shows status.

Use this skill when you need operational, diagnostic guidance by Friday: thief diagnosis, demand mix analysis, Personal Kanban, and ritual design. Choose the broader kanban skill for CFDs, Little's Law, and foundational method principles.

Maximizing individual utilization creates queues and context-switching costs, with roughly 20 percent productivity lost per concurrent project. Flow improves when WIP is limited and people help where the bottleneck is rather than starting new work.