# Boards and Bottlenecks

Model the real workflow, expose queues and policies, and respond to bottlenecks by swarming rather than feeding them.

Duration: 7 min

A useful board tells the truth about how work moves. Waiting stages belong on the board, policies should be explicit, and the place where work piles up deserves help rather than more arrivals.

## fmap-m4-l3-v1

The approved narration and storyboard are present in the source pack. Provider media remains inactive pending review.

## fmap-m4-l3-digest

### Boards that think

A useful board makes the actual workflow visible. Columns should represent real states, including waiting. If work regularly waits for approval, hiding that queue inside “Doing” removes the evidence needed to improve it.

Each movement needs an explicit policy: what must be true for an item to enter or leave the column? Policies reduce private assumptions and make disagreements about readiness discussable. Per-column WIP limits prevent every stage from filling simultaneously.

The bottleneck is the stage constraining the system's pace. It often appears as a growing pile immediately before limited capacity. Feeding it with more upstream work increases waiting. The better response is to stop pulling new work, swarm the constrained stage where appropriate, remove blockers, improve capability, or revise the workflow.

Removing a column does not remove the work. Raising a limit so the cards fit does not improve capacity. Moving incomplete work to Done only hides the quality problem. The board's value is honesty: visible queues can be diagnosed; invisible queues merely surprise customers.

A board is therefore not decorative project reporting. It is a shared model of a system and a prompt for coordinated action.