I asked on Twitter yesterday “How likely is it that a team using Kanban would evolve Scrum?” I asked that after reading an observation that Scrum started by creating an ideal environment. Now viagra 40mg better than a kick in the nuts” href=”https://paulklipp.com/blog/evolutionary-change-better-than-a-kick-in-the-nuts/”>I’ve already blogged about why an evolutionary approach may not get you to the best place you could be, viagra sale but if Scrum were truely the best way to organize a team’s work, then some teams committed to questioning everything and improving through experimentation might arrive at the familiar three roles, three questions, and four meetings and find velocity and burndown charts to be the best way to measure their ability to deliver to their commitments during timeboxed iterations. (How’s that for Scrum in one sentence?)
I think it’s as unlikely as a million monkeys typing out Shakespeare (which thanks to the internet we now know doesn’t happen – a million monkeys on a million typewriters mostly spout hate and share cat pictures) but it could happen.
But then Martin Burns asked the inverse question — could a sufficiently mature Scrum team evolve Kanban? I’d say of course not, but thinking about how I’d explain my answer gave me the idea that such an explanation could help to clarify for some people the difference between Scrum and Kanban and why they are not competing methodologies and why the Kanban vs. Scrum debate is nonsense.
First, here’s how a team using Kanban might discover Scrum. They might find it difficult to maintain WIP limits because there are so many people making urgent demands of them, so they might experiment with tasking one person to evaluate all such requests and prioritize them into a list. Tight WIP limits might create slack that some team members might use to help others, even outside of their formal job titles. Their project manager might not be a jerk and so discover that he prefers facilitating learning to enforcing responsibility. So they might discover that three roles are all they need.
That team could decide that they’re spending too much time estimating work that never gets done, so they might start batching the top of task list periodically. They might even experiment with reducing distractions by making commitments to focus for strict periods of time. Any team that in a situation that makes them capable of thinking that would help are probably right and their experiments would be validated by the resulting lower average cycle time.
So while it may seem unlikely that a team experimenting with improving flow would discover that the practices, rules and roles of Scrum are a step on the road to ideal, it’s not impossible. The reason it’s not impossible is that a team using Kanban has already made some crucial decisions. They’ve decided to change how they work. They’ve committed to experiementing and improving by any means.
This is the key difference between a team using Kanban and a Scrum team. The Scrum team has committed to improving by getting better at Scrum. That means that a lot of options are off the table. Scrum has rules, roles and practices and while it’s becoming more flexible than in the days of “Scrum-butt” there are still things which might improve flow, but not without stepping off the Scrum tracks and going rougue. However, adopting Kanban as part of their improvement arsenal is not one of them. A Scrum team can adopt Kanban and still do Scrum, with the one caveat that as long as they’re committed to doing Scrum better, they are not fully embracing the second principle of Kanban which is to commit to incremental change.
The flexibility of Kanban as a value delivery improvement tool means that it can help any team, under any circumstances, even, perhaps especially, if they are using Scrum. I say especially Scrum teams, because one thing I love about Scrum teams is that they have already demonstrated courage, discipline, and a commitment to improvement,. Without these qualities, Kanban is unlikely to be very helpful. But it’s just a tool. You do Scrum, but you use Kanban. You can evolve Scrum, but Kanban is something you adopt.
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I’m curious to hear more on “committment to improvement” vs. “committ[ment] to to incremental change.”
I expect Agilists to embrace change, even if it may means their environment degrades. Remove or revert degrading experiments, and change again.
I see too much “Do Scrum better” instead of “Do better”–as if Scrum is a sacred cow. I see Scrumban as a way to declare that you’re using Scrum but applying Kanban tools and principles of change (and flow), and not necessarily on some nirvanic course to abolish Scrum.
Commitment to improvement at all marks a distinct difference from “keeping our heads down and punching the clock” but indeed, what you want to improve and how you are willing to pursue that improvement creates critical differences between teams. I think a common flow in the quest for improvement is to use a change strategy based on best practices. Too many people Do Scrum or Do Kanban or Do XP and hope it helps, which is the opposite of either evolutionary change or experiment-based change.
One thing I like about Scrumban is that it makes it clear that you’re not throwing out all that works from Scrum and that Scrum and Kanban can play nicely together. One thing about Scrumban that concerns me is that it’s hard to know when you’ve evolved to a point at which it’s disingenuous to continue to use the Scrum name.