Combine Scrum and Kanban, two Complementary Approaches to Getting Things Done
Teams who wish to combine both frameworks may do so successfully with four adaptions and four data-driven elements to design improvements.
Scrum is a good choice for teams working on incremental delivery of something. The team has enough information to start and reasonably forecast a short-term goal to complete a small working piece of something valuable. Kanban is a good choice for teams with a constant influx of requests, sometimes requiring daily or hourly prioritization. What about teams balancing projects and a large load of support or operation asks? Consider combining Scrum AND Kanban to help balance the workload and reasonably forecast delivery. After all, the goal of both approaches is to deliver more value for the user in the quickest manner. They share other similar elements, too.
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- Scrum and Kanban use a “pull” system — meaning the team chooses when and how much work to do. They pull the work into their system rather than having it “pushed” on them from sources external to the team.
- Scrum and Kanban use data (evidence) to make small, continual changes to optimize the process.
- Both frameworks emphasize responding to change over following a plan.
Read on for more detail on how to combine elements of both frameworks and what you should measure.
Kanban
WHAT A method to track workflow while maintaining the number of Work-in-Progress (WIP) activities. The number of WIP is small enough to avoid lower-value tasks but big enough to reduce being idle. WIP is so important to Kanban that many enthusiasts believe you won’t get the benefits of Kanban without it. (Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments.)
Kanban is like ordering a pizza: every task in the process is a step towards fulfilling the order. The team is continually experimenting with minimizing time and waste between orders.
HOW Kanban teams visualize all the work in their system and how it flows through the team. As the team works, they pause to inspect areas of waste and friction and actively work to remove them. Next, the team sets a work-in-progress limit to help focus on completing work instead of starting new work. This practice diminishes context switching and reduces waste. Finally, a Kanban team creates policies that make sense for their domain and problem, such as how they will intake, prioritize, and plan work.
COMPARISON
- Like Scrum, the team optimizes its system with continual improvements and evidence-based decisions.
- Unlike Scrum, Kanban has no concept of ‘Sprints’ — it is continuous and focuses on removing waste and improving the flow of work. Some experienced Kanban practitioners strongly recommend a daily standup. Other than that, the team creates its policies, accountabilities, and cadence.
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Scrum
Scrum is like delivering a catered dining experience: As a team, you must prepare and complete various dishes in a specific time to deliver a hot, desirable meal with a defined goal, such as celebrating Mardi Gras with a festive, Cajun-inspired theme. The Scrum Team uses Sprint Planning to identify what needs to be done and organize the work, including who will work on each item. Quality is never compromised, but the number of dishes or complexity of the choices may be adapted to fit the time available, the ingredients on hand, and the diners’ dietary restrictions.
WHAT A defined framework with clear accountabilities and events allows the Developers to manage work and quality and the Product Owner to make scope tradeoffs to meet deadlines. The Scrum Master ensures the Scrum Team upholds Scrum and that all the Scrum Framework elements are in play. Otherwise, Scrum enthusiasts believe you won’t get the benefits of Scrum.
Comment below if you are adapting Scrum to fit your organization’s status quo, or adapting your status quo to optimize Scrum.
HOW Scrum uses short, consistent, and repetitive periods (a Sprint) to deliver work. The length of the Sprint is short enough to keep the team focused but long enough to deliver a shippable increment of work. The Scrum events cadence minimizes other distractions and allows opportunities to inspect and adapt. The Scrum artifacts ensure transparency of all the work in the system.
COMPARISON
- Like Kanban, the team manages their Work-In-Progress, focusing on finishing before starting something new
- Unlike Kanban, a Scrum team is a cross-functional team, committing to delivering a shared goal in the prescribed timebox
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4 Adaptions for Scrum with Kanban
Teams who wish to combine both Scrum and Kanban, what Scrum.org coined Scrum WITH Kanban, may do so successfully with a few adaptions and a commitment to improving using data-driven insights.
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- Visualize your work & create your workflow. This action is easy, and most teams start here but don’t continue. Continuing our dining analogy, visualizing but not optimizing the flow would be like eating dessert but avoiding the vegetables. Discovering the most significant opportunities for improvement and acting on them is critical to a healthy, value-rich workflow — like eating green vegetables adds to a healthy lifestyle. Not as exciting to practice, but it provides sustainable value. You will achieve fewer benefits without implementing the following steps to optimize your workflow.
- Adapt existing Scrum events to focus on flow and create safe-to-fail experiments based on data.
- Set and honor a realistic Work in Progress limit.
- Kaizen (practice continuous improvement) frequently with all teams involved in the overall workstream. The goal is to create safe-to-fail experiments that optimize how work flows through the system.
Four Metrics that Matter
Image by Author, credit to Scrum.org
To benefit from using Scrum WITH Kanban, Scrum.org teaches that Scrum Teams using Kanban should track the following four metrics: Work in Progress, Work Item Age (Blocked/Age), Lead Time, and Throughput.
- Work in Progress: Limiting Work in Progress is a practice that aims to reduce and stabilize work underway. It improves your ability to make choices about enabling flow, provides predictability, and is essential to enhance focus and diminish waste and context switching.
- Blocked/Age: Highlight work that isn’t moving within the stage where the work is blocked. Do this by tagging the item with a Blocked attribute rather than adding a new stage (or column) showing “Blocked.” Using this practice tracks the age of an item within each stage to provide a more accurate and complete picture of how work is moving from one step to the next.
- Lead Time: Lead time is the amount of time between two cycles, e.g., from when an idea is proposed (or a hypothesis formed) until a customer can benefit from that idea. This measure may vary based on the combination of customer and deliverable products. Another way to consider Lead Time is the duration between an item’s creation date in a Product Backlog to the date it is declared Done. It is an essential contributing factor to customer satisfaction.
- Throughput: Throughput measures the number of issues completed for a chosen time frame, a day, a week, or a month, for example. Understanding our throughput helps us plan capacity, just like you might see in a grocery store queue. For example, some people with a large order may take more time, while others may have only a few items. Overall, calculating the average throughput will indicate the number of open lanes required to keep the flow of customers moving through check-out.
Getting Started
“Doing Scrum or Kanban is not the goal. Continuous learning is.”
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So says thought leader and practitioner Henrik Kniberg of Spotify, Lego, and Crisp. So if you are not holding strong and insightful retrospectives, start now. This action is the key to improving your agile fluency and provides a forum for the people responsible for the work to make suggestions to improve it.
~Julee Everett
Live your truth; hone your craft; show your thanks
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PS — Did you know that Scrum.org now offers professional certification for Scrum with Kanban? Check it out!
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