Dispelling common misconceptions in Lean, Kanban and Scrum
Posted on 17. Nov, 2012 by ger in Agile, New Ways to Work, Scrum
Happiness Door Scrum Training Dublin
They say teaching is the best way to learn something. Recently, I delivered a Scrum training course for a multinational company in Dublin. Afterwards I did some reading to followup on some of the questions that came up. This reading lead me to some interesting new thinking on Scrum, Lean, Agile and even running training courses. It looks like many people have common misconceptions about how Kanban and Scrum fit together.
Some background
Scrum is one of the agile project management techniques that can make your team far more productive. Most of the time I’m CTO of Goshido (cloud software for project communication). Goshido is inspired in part by some of the concepts in Scrum. Some of our customers ask for training in agile project management and Scrum in particular. Our Scrum training is unique because I am still a practicing software developer and project manager, not a Scrum-trainer who delivers training every week.
Lean is a process improvement discipline that software development and startup companies.
Kanban is one of the Lean tools, originally a card or a box used in manufacturing to signal depletion of product, parts, or inventory. It is a way to “pull” work through a system.
Overlapping phases & organizing by project
The company I was training has structured the organization based on roles and skills rather than projects. The analysts are in one team, the UX people another, the developers and testers yet another, and operations another. During the project there’s a handover from one team to another. One of the principles of Scrum is to organize teams around the work that needs to be done for a customer, to mix the disciplines together with overlapping phases. Dustin Curtis tells a great story about the magic of Penn and Teller to illustrate the point that:
- Assembly lines work fantastically well for raw assembly, but they suck the life out of creative people.
Getting feedback during training
During each training day I asked people to provide anonymous feedback both half way through and at the end of the day. I applied Jurgen Appelo’s happiness door technique. I got great feedback from the attendees and was able to make adjustments both during the day and for subsequent days to make the training more relevant and valuable to the people attending.
Kaizen, retrospectives and continuous improvement
One of the technical leads was concerned about the business focus of the product backlog. How would he get technical tasks like a transition to github into the backlog? He knew this would boost the productivity of the software team but what if the product owner didn’t feel the same way?
Conversely, I’ve seen situations in other companies where technical leads have refactored parts of a system without concern for the business priorities. This in turn lead to a surprise then an overreaction by senior management who as a consequence put unnecessary controls in place to enforce visibility.
In my experience, Scrum retrospectives pay big dividends at the end of each sprint but it’s easy to let them slide. In the post “Getting Lean with Scrum”, Christine Hegarty describes how you can add a simple process to retrospectives.
She suggests capturing a single kaizen in each retrospective to be added to the next Sprint backlog as a task. I think it’s a great idea, and could balance the needs of continuous improvement and business priorities while making retrospectives more actionable.
Misconceptions about Lean and Kanban
While reading Christine’s post I also spotted a guest post by Jim Coplien describing Kanban, Lean and Scrum. I remember Jim from the early days of the software patterns movement. He wrote a pattern language for software organizations. Jim is a co-author of the recent book Lean Software Architecture. In the blog post, he clarifies some of the many misconceptions of Kanban and it’s goals.
- The challenge is to develop a learning organization that will find ways to reduce the number of kanban and thereby reduce and finally eliminate the inventory buffer. Remember: the kanban is an organized system of inventory buffers and, according to Ohno, inventory is waste…
He’s also concerned it’s been missappropriated in software development.
- Kanban applies to repetitive work — building the same item again and again… Not everything can be replenished based on a pull system; some things must be scheduled… That is what software is like: We rarely build the same thing again and again.
The ideal Scrum team “does a little analysis, a little design, a little building, and a little testing all at once in very short cycles”. While Kanban can be a good fit for teams that view work as firefighting…
- A good Scrum team automatically enjoys the provisions of kanban when practicing one-piece continuous flow. It is a built-in way to limit work in progress while encouraging teamwork. It gives team members time-boxed autonomy to carry out their plans while enabling them to better meet their planned forecast. Such maturity may be a foundation for later addition of techniques like kanban…
Learn more
Try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido is so flexible it can be used for Scrum, Lean and projects with traditional work-breakdown plans. Some of our customers do all three together. They map out a long term plan using Gannt charts then each team runs sub-projects as Scrum-Sprints.