Aging work — or stalled work in progress — often sneaks up on us.
Like our own aging process, it’s a problem we rarely recognize. Although our daily decisions to reprioritize or start new work may seem minor, those actions normalize aged work across the organization over time.
After working with leaders and teams for more than 25 years to improve flow, I’ve observed that when teams accept aged work as normal, it becomes the biggest barrier to flow and hobbles time to market.
To improve, we must confront the cumulative impact of our choices and change how we prioritize and manage work.
A daily review of aging work allows the organization to change course in real time rather than in the rearview mirror.
What is Aging Work?
Aging work refers to tasks that have started but exceeded their flow time — that is, the full duration between the beginning and end of a particular process. Work ages because it’s stuck, often waiting for another activity to finish.
In my experience, many organizations carry aging work far beyond their flow time. It’s not uncommon to see backlogs filled with work that’s more than one or two years old.
For all practical purposes, the aging work seems abandoned, yet we hold on to the hope that we’ll complete it someday. This approach creates problems, like backlog clutter and false expectations, that make it harder to focus on priorities and drive meaningful progress.
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Flow Load vs. Aging Work
Aging work and flow load are related but not the same concept.
Flow load refers to all the work you’ve started but still need to finish, and aging work represents only the stalled work in your flow load.
I often use an aging bands chart to distinguish between the two metrics.
For example, I worked with an organization recently whose current flow load was about 700 items, of which 56% were aged beyond 90 days. Their goal was to improve flow with an aggregate flow time of 14 days.
However, this conflicted with the reality that 80.5% of items had already aged beyond their aggregate flow time. It was nearly impossible for this organization to improve flow until they addressed their aging work. The backlog itself undermined their progress.
3 Reasons Aging Work-in-Progress Sabotages Flow
It causes variation in your data.
Improving average flow time can be difficult when there’s a lot of variation in the data. However, for 90% of the value streams I work with, flow time is so skewed by outliers that any other improvements are hidden.
Let’s say your average flow time is 19.91 days. That seems like a good number until you look at the individual flow times.
- 50% of features complete in 9 days or less
- 85% of features complete in 44.7 days or less
- The flow time variation seems to exacerbate once an item stays open beyond 30 days
If the real goal is to improve customer experience (the business outcome) — and the biggest factor behind dissatisfied customers comes when delivery slips beyond 30 days (the team’s output) — then the organization needs to look at its aging work in progress at 15 days.
When organizations start their journey by understanding the variation in their data, they’re much more equipped to identify meaningful improvements in achieving business outcomes.
It’s a canary in the coal mine for anticipating waste.
At a typical organization, 15% of effort is wasted on canceled work – and closer to 30% of effort is wasted at the worst-performing organizations.
The longer it takes for teams to cancel work, the more it costs to cancel it. Cancel early. Regularly reviewing aging work can support early cancellation decisions and identify work that has already been effectively abandoned.
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It desensitizes people from the customer experience.
At one organization I worked with, aging work was a major issue – 80% of the backlog was more than 90 days old, and 28% was more than one year old.
Ironically, the same organization touted its success in agile transformation. Their sprint-focused metrics painted a picture of progress, but the aging data told a different story.
When I showed the teams the extent of their aging work, they nodded in agreement. The problem? They were only measuring completed work, ignoring the delays in their backlog preventing them from promptly delivering value to the customer. Their customer experience was suffering.
Small Adjustments Yield Powerful Results
Regular aging work reviews have been the stickiest and most widely adopted of all the practices I recommend while working with organizations.
That’s because aging work is the judo move for flow – small adjustments that yield powerful results.
Here are two changes you can take to help aging work stick with your teams:
- Support a mindset shift from starting work to finishing work.
- Pair your daily review of aging work by asking, “What did we finish today?”
These actions will deliver significant flow improvements with minimal effort and make a lasting impact on how teams prioritize and deliver value.
Go Deeper
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With more than 25 years of experience in IT, software, and automotive industries, Chris helps organizations improve their business outcomes by applying the Flow Framework. He is a certified Flow Framework Professional and a Flow Ambassador with a passion for learning and sharing best practices in value stream management, DevOps, and agile methodologies. Chris's mission is to empower teams and leaders to deliver value faster and more effectively by aligning their software delivery with their strategic goals, measuring their flow metrics, and identifying and eliminating bottlenecks and waste. He has successfully enabled value stream optimization across various domains, such as embedded software systems, quality and testing, and sourcing and governance. Chris enjoys collaborating with the community and contributing to the advancement of the Flow Framework as a thought leader and practitioner.
Chris Gallivan
Principal Flow Advisor at Planview
With more than 25 years of experience in IT, software, and automotive industries, Chris helps organizations improve their business outcomes by applying the Flow Framework. He is a certified Flow Framework Professional and a Flow Ambassador with a passion for learning and sharing best practices in value stream management, DevOps, and agile methodologies.
Chris's mission is to empower teams and leaders to deliver value faster and more effectively by aligning their software delivery with their strategic goals, measuring their flow metrics, and identifying and eliminating bottlenecks and waste. He has successfully enabled value stream optimization across various domains, such as embedded software systems, quality and testing, and sourcing and governance. Chris enjoys collaborating with the community and contributing to the advancement of the Flow Framework as a thought leader and practitioner.
