Kanban is not for everyone

This post was inspired by the “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” book by David J. Anderson.

My thoughts on Kanban and the book:

  • It is a great book, you should read it. I highly recommend it as introduction to Kanban.
  • Kanban is oriented on consistent throughput. Scrum, on the other hand, focuses on feedback/improvement loops.
  • You can apply Kanban to complex projects, but it seems better suited to smaller applications.
  • The layered approach to larger jobs, that is described in the second part of the book, is less intuitive than Scrum, in my opinion. It is not that it would not work, it is just less complex with Scrum.
  • Kanban is a perfect fit for teams that focus on request-based work, where the scope is well understood.
  • Groups that it might fit best:
    • Sustaining Engineering/Maintenance Engineering
    • IT
    • Release Engineering
  • Limiting Work In Progress is crucial. Capping WIP is important to all agile methodologies.
  • Scrum and Kanban should borrow from each other. Standups, WIP limit, reviews, automation… – are practices used regardless of approach used.

This post is also available in: English

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