As the cloud migration gained momentum, the organization looked busy everywhere. Teams were active, backlogs were full, and progress appeared visible across the system. Yet delivery felt uneven. Some work moved quickly, while other efforts stalled without a clear explanation.
The initial assumption was that capacity was the issue — too much to do and not enough time. In response, teams started more work earlier, hoping parallel effort would keep things moving.
Instead, coordination degraded.
As work-in-progress increased, dependencies multiplied. Decisions waited on other decisions. Teams spent more time checking in just to understand where things stood. Progress didn’t stop, but it became harder to predict and harder to manage.
The team chose to make work-in-progress explicit. Rather than tracking everything that could be worked on, they focused on what was actively in motion and how it depended on other efforts. The goal wasn’t enforcement at first — it was visibility.
What surfaced was uncomfortable. The constraint wasn’t effort or skill. It was alignment. Work was advancing faster than shared understanding could keep up, and coordination was happening reactively rather than by design.
To address this, the team introduced cross-team alignment rituals — not as status meetings, but as deliberate moments to surface dependencies, negotiate sequencing, and make tradeoffs visible before friction turned into delay.
Reducing work-in-progress didn’t immediately increase throughput. In fact, it sometimes felt slower. But over time, work flowed with fewer surprises. Fewer initiatives competed for attention at once. Decisions landed with more context, even when outcomes were still uncertain.
What changed most was how progress was understood. Instead of asking who was busy, the organization began asking what was actually blocking movement. Coordination became a first-class concern rather than a side effect of scale.
Insight: making work visible revealed alignment — not capacity — as the true bottleneck. By addressing coordination explicitly, the organization reduced unpredictability, improved decision timing, and made progress easier to steer as the migration continued, without mistaking activity for advancement.