Agile is a set of principles that helps deliver value to the customer incrementally. Agile in an umbrella which comes with various frameworks that enable teams to reap the benefits of customer satisfaction, delivering value incrementally and frequently, reduced feedback loop, and so on.
Embracing Agile ways of working means implementing one of its frameworks for your project delivery or selecting a mix of various frameworks and practices identified for your context by an agility health assessment conducted from an agile consulting perspective. The most commonly used Agile frameworks are SCRUM and KANBAN. Both of which comes with its own set of practices, checklists, and boards.
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General Pitfall
When it comes to Agile Adoption, companies tend to implement SCRUM in their projects because it is more popular, and they struggle because, prima facie, the framework chosen might not fit their need or cater to their project type. SCRUM does have its advantages because of its simplicity, but it might not cater to all the projects.
If your project demands continuous delivery ( maybe 1-2 releases every 2-3 days ), if your team cannot plan an iteration, if there are a good amount of ad hoc requirements coming your way in the projects, if you have a continuous inflow of work, then Scrum is not your framework to go, and you should try KANBAN as your Agile approach.
Understanding the suitability of the approach is one of the first aspects of our usual agile consulting engagements.
What is KANBAN?
Kanban is a lean-agile framework which focuses on visualizing the flow of work and continuously delivering the value by monitoring the flow and changing it to deliver maximum value. Kanban is about creating a workflow for the development team to visualize how the work moves from “To Do” to “DONE”.
Team members use kanban board software to see/visualize what work is in what state, which helps them to prioritize work completion. Kanban emphasizes work completion and streamlining the workflow and continues to move work items to the Done state at the earliest. Kanban helps teams identify potential blockages or bottlenecks, enabling teams to analyze and remove them before it becomes a concern for delivery.
Unlike Scrum, Kanban does not have ceremonies like Sprint Planning, Review, Refinement, and Retrospective. Kanban Teams generally follow Daily Stand-Ups to discuss the progress and impediments. Also, KANBAN does not prescribe any roles like Scrum Master / Product Owner while they are mapped to “Service Delivery Manager,” who manages the flow of work, and “Service Request Manager,” who manages the requirements part of the project.
The Kanban method is motivated by ‘mutual respect for the entire team and is based on nine Kanban values, namely :
- Transparency
- Balance
- Collaboration
- Customer Focus
- Workflow
- Leadership
- Understanding
- Agreement & Respect
These Kanban values form the core of Kanban and are crucial in implementing kanban in any team or organization.
When to Choose Kanban?
As mentioned earlier, SCRUM might not suit all projects. Choosing SCRUM / or KANBAN basically depends on a few aspects like Project Delivery needs, Nature of the requirements, team’s allocation, Team’s agile maturity, and Technical support for delivery ( Automation and DevOps ).
Here are a few pointers which will help you choose Kanban as your delivery framework
● Customer/Project demands continuous delivery than delivery through iterations ( Continuous Inflow of work and Continuous outflow of delivery )
● When the requirements are changing frequently
● When there are a good amount of ad hoc requirements
● When your team cannot plan for iterations ( Plan and Deliver )
● When your team’s agile maturity is good. When your team can pull work rather than waiting for someone to assign work
● When your team has a dynamic allocation to the project
● When there is enough tech support ( Automation and DevOps ) to cater to continuous delivery
● When your project does not demand any dedicated roles like Product Owner, Scrum master to play or monitor the project
Conclusion
Choosing a framework which best suits your project is a key step before your team starts development. Not all projects can be delivered with SCRUM. Both Scrum and Kanban has its pros and cons and are selected on the basis of what kind of delivery is needed, your team dynamics, and the customer needs. We hope this material helps the readers to understand the fact that Agile is not equal to Scrum, and there are other frameworks like KANBAN, which is also an Agile framework that may suit your project based on the above factors.
For more insight, blogs, and articles on kanban value, scrum, or agile, please visit https://benzne.com/blogs/.
