Chapter 5A: Joe’s Blocks Teaches you WIP

So far I’ve written out the phrase “Work In Progress” to describe that concept, but the Lean world usually shortens those words to the initialism “WIP.”

If you’ve ever worked at a larger law firm or read the law practice management guides of the last century, you’ve probably understood the term WIP to describe a very specific thing: Hours that a lawyer has worked but not yet billed. Technically this is a form of WIP, but it is simultaneously a misunderstanding and an unnecessary narrowing of the term.

Broadly, WIP is a form of inventory—something that you have to store and track and account for in your business or personal space (whether that space is physical, virtual, or mental). In the broader business world, WIP is seen as a necessary evil: You have a process, and raw materials must flow through that process in order to become valuable products to your customer. But while it is in-progress, that unfinished work is WIP. It represents a series of investments you have made that have not yet yielded a realized benefit. And investment without benefit is waste.

It helps to understand WIP if you think of a simple manufacturing workflow, so let’s try a quick hypothetical. Joe’s Blocks makes blocks. The simple ones you think of as a children’s toy. Joe’s factory is a warehouse building on the outskirts of town. They take raw lengths of lumber, cut it into cubes, sand each block smooth, paint it a nice bright color, and package up a group of ‘em to send off to Joe’s customers (we’ll imagine, for now, that Joe runs a direct-to-consumer business).

The moment the delivery truck drops off a shipment of lumber at one end of the warehouse, Joe has WIP. He has invested in raw materials, but he has not yet realized any return on his investment. Holy cow, his team hasn’t even done any work and WIP already!

But it gets worse.

As soon as his worker puts saw to wood (really as soon as they show up to work in the morning), there’s more WIP. Joe is paying his employees, he bought the saw (and pays rent on the building to put it in), and the person running the cutting station has expended time and effort forming the correct shape. Investment galore! But all Joe has to show for it are some shorter chunks of wood than he had a few minutes ago. His customers surely aren’t going to pay for that.

And so it goes through sanding (more investment), and painting (still more investment), and so on until that chunk of wood has been transformed into a cheerful toy that will cause somebody to part with their hard-earned resources (money) in order to bestow joy on a child. Then, and only then, does Joe’s Blocks realize a return on all that investment: when there is some tangible transfer of Value.

We’re going to come back to Joe’s Blocks to illustrate some other elements of Lean workflows, because thinking about this stuff in the context of a physical, visible manufacturing facility is a whole lot easier than trying to do it with ephemeral, invisible knowledge work. The concepts, however, work exactly the same.

For now, focus on that problem with unfinished work. There is no inherent value in it—especially from the customer’s perspective. Yes, the steps are necessary to produce value and your customer surely knows this to some degree. But they don’t care. Your customer wants to see the delight on their grandkid’s face when they unwrap their beautiful new toy (or whatever the equivalent of that is for the legal product they’re buying).

When a customer orders something they usually want that thing, not the process for making it. Same is true with a legal service. If you owned a day spa, where the customer really is paying for the experience more than the outcome, then things might be a little different. But most legal process is not a spa day. ⁷