This morning, the #kanban and #scrum Twittersphere was buzzing over a guest blog by Jim Cope on Jeff Sutherland's Scrum Blog; "An Alternative to Kanban: One-Piece Continuous Flow"
This is a gross oversimplification but in essence, Cope is asserting that, 'we don't need no stinking Kanban'. While my experience as an Agile Coach is inconsistent with some of his conclusions (i.e. that Kanban " take[s] away the sense of teamwork and "positive pressure") he does make some good points. For example, he points out that, "Kanban is properly applied as a selective, detailed fix to a specific problem. It is not a philosophy of development." and he's exactly right. Kanban is a tool not a philosophy. It's a tip of the iceberg thing. Sort of like 'daily scrums', burn-down charts, retrospectives, and Sprints.
Cope states, "We see teams adopting this form of kanban, as a tool or methodology in its own right rather than as a worldview, without first having built foundations and disciplines of one-piece flow." I agree with that wholeheartedly but the irony is that you could just as easily substitute the word "Scrum" for "kanban" and the statement would be no less true. The wide spread practice of, 'Scrum-But' is sufficient proof of this.
The problem of teams applying frameworks and tools without a grasp of the underlying worldview and principles isn't isolated to the use of Kanban; Ceremony rich cargo cult adoptions of Scrum are hardly a rarity and a CSM course provides no guarantee that good teamwork will naturally follow nor that the decisions made by a team will be effective. Single piece flow requires a lot of discipline.
Kanban, like elements of Scrum, is essentially one tool in the Agile arsenal to augment the decisions made by a team to achieve single piece flow. If the team achieves that flow using Kanban without sacrificing other objectives (i.e. teamwork, high motivation, etc.) then the tool is effective. If the same results can be achieved with lower ceremony and overhead, all the better.
Without the application of the underlying disciplines, BOTH Scrum and Kanban are likely to flounder.
I think the real takeaway here is that blind application of any tool, be it Kanban or Scrum, does not confer automatic benefits. Ultimately, it gets down to individuals interacting as a disciplined team guided by principles (such as the dynamics that give rise to single piece flow) to make effective decisions.
This is a gross oversimplification but in essence, Cope is asserting that, 'we don't need no stinking Kanban'. While my experience as an Agile Coach is inconsistent with some of his conclusions (i.e. that Kanban " take[s] away the sense of teamwork and "positive pressure") he does make some good points. For example, he points out that, "Kanban is properly applied as a selective, detailed fix to a specific problem. It is not a philosophy of development." and he's exactly right. Kanban is a tool not a philosophy. It's a tip of the iceberg thing. Sort of like 'daily scrums', burn-down charts, retrospectives, and Sprints.
Cope states, "We see teams adopting this form of kanban, as a tool or methodology in its own right rather than as a worldview, without first having built foundations and disciplines of one-piece flow." I agree with that wholeheartedly but the irony is that you could just as easily substitute the word "Scrum" for "kanban" and the statement would be no less true. The wide spread practice of, 'Scrum-But' is sufficient proof of this.
The problem of teams applying frameworks and tools without a grasp of the underlying worldview and principles isn't isolated to the use of Kanban; Ceremony rich cargo cult adoptions of Scrum are hardly a rarity and a CSM course provides no guarantee that good teamwork will naturally follow nor that the decisions made by a team will be effective. Single piece flow requires a lot of discipline.
Kanban, like elements of Scrum, is essentially one tool in the Agile arsenal to augment the decisions made by a team to achieve single piece flow. If the team achieves that flow using Kanban without sacrificing other objectives (i.e. teamwork, high motivation, etc.) then the tool is effective. If the same results can be achieved with lower ceremony and overhead, all the better.
Without the application of the underlying disciplines, BOTH Scrum and Kanban are likely to flounder.
I think the real takeaway here is that blind application of any tool, be it Kanban or Scrum, does not confer automatic benefits. Ultimately, it gets down to individuals interacting as a disciplined team guided by principles (such as the dynamics that give rise to single piece flow) to make effective decisions.
