Beyond Scrum => Kanban

Ken was asked years ago, what will be the next interesting thing beyond Scrum. He had no answer. Now we do have an answer. We go KANBAN.

What does a Kanban System look like for software development?  Very simply, there is a queue of work, which goes through a number of stages of development until its done.  When work is completed in a stage, it goes into a downstream queue for the next stage.  When someone needs new work to do, they pull it from their upstream queue.

Self-Organization, as Ken always mentioned is “Simple, but very hard” so it was logical, that after numeros failures of Scrum in hundreds of scrum development teams, we needed to come up with a BIG more structure. We need to tell the development teams what they have to do and we need to make sure that all activities: specification, requirements engineering, development testing will be worked on in exactly the right order, sorry FLOW. And we need to make sure that all roles in the development team needs to know exactly when the owner of a role can do a piece of work. So they can really focus on their specialization.

And as we understand now, after years of running to much unsuccessful Scrum with non creative team memebers it is absolutely clear, that we needed a clear distinction between “who” orders the functionality and who “delivers”. Development teams are now much more happy as the do not need to think anymore. They do just need to work according to plan and we do not have any break in the deliver process anymore.

Using a clear and defined start and end state of the whole system, was also not very productive. A continous flow of work was much more effective. So we could eliminate the thinking about the process. That was only time consuming and a lot fo waste.

This development of Scrum to Kanban was completely logical. As the only really important thing in Scrum was always the TASKBOARD and everything else in Scrum needed to be streamlined. So we do have now a very clear focused PROCESS that works much better than all the Scrum Framework bla bla. So the process driven industries showed us again the WAY to go.

More about the new way you can read when you google [Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban]