March 26, 2024

Background

Schools are full of dedicated people who love working hard. School people of this sort are essential to a school’s success. Schools also seem to have almost unlimited amounts of work to be done and duties to be covered. Too often school leaders rely on their staff to keep doing more, taking on “one more thing” which ends up causing burnt out people and a loss of engagement. Leaders need to understand the concept of Work In Progress [WIP] to keep “one more thing” from eating up the good will and energy of faculty and staff. WIP management has been studied extensively in organizations outside of education and there are many lessons and best practices that are highly transferable to the educational context. 

Current condition

In schools that do not track or manage WIP, the risks are significant. In addition to burnout, important projects can be neglected or even dropped. One of the costs of unmanaged WIP is time lost to context switching: reducing the impact of the good will and drive of your faculty and staff. The chart below shows how time loss accumulates with increasing WIP [shown on the…