This document summarizes a team's transition from Scrum to Kanban. The team used Scrum practices like 2-week iterations and daily standups but found the iterations felt artificial and Scrum was not flexible enough for their work. With Kanban, they visualized their workflow on a board, limited work-in-progress, and measured lead time. This provided greater flexibility while still maintaining structure and discipline. The team observed benefits like improved responsiveness and ability to handle unexpected work, though protecting capacity was important. In summary, Kanban was a better fit for the team's needs than Scrum.

1. From
Scrum
to
Kanban
Neil Johnson

2. Scrum
Kanban
Lessons Learned

3. “The only thing that really
matters is the quality of the
team. Everything else is an
optimisation.“

4. Scrum

5. Working environment
• Software as a Service
• Services sold on their reliability and availability
• Industry is still very young, continual innovation is
essential
• Teams are cross functional
• All members responsible for design,
implementation, deployment and maintenance
• Easy access to Product Development/Business

6. Before Kanban we used Scrum (kinda)
• Scrum practices
• Time boxed iterations of 2 weeks
• White board and post its to track status
• Daily stand ups
• Fortnightly retrospectives
• Not Scrum
• Deploy multiple times an iteration
• No formal product owner
• No end of iteration demo

7. What we liked about Scrum
• A sense of rhythm and points to reflect on our
working practices
• Better visibility over tasks that were dragging
on
• A highly visible feedback loop to help improve
our estimations

8. Scrum was great but we had
two problems with it….

9. The iteration deadline felt artificial
• No expectation from business of a post
iteration demo
• High dependence on outside parties
• Frequently over/undershoot due to external
dependencies
• Time box limited choice of tasks in case of
undershoot

10. Not flexible enough mid iteration
• A 2 weeks iteration promises, on average, a 3 week
delay
• The team is responsible for 2nd line support,
operations and maintenance
• We can assign a maintainer role to shield the team
from day to day requests, though this is not always
sufficient
• Need a process that actively embraces the notion
unplanned work

11. Kanban

12. Scrum vs Kanban comparison
• In common:-
• Both are Lean and Agile
• Both use pull scheduling
• Both use transparency to drive process
improvement
• Both focus on delivering working software as soon
as possible

13. Scrum vs Kanban comparison
• Differences
• Kanban less prescriptive than Scrum
• Kanban does not prescribe fixed iterations
• In Kanban Lead Time is the principle metric, in
Scrum it is velocity
• Kanban limits Work in Progress directly, Scrum
does this indirectly through sprint planning

14. Why Kanban?
• Retain our discipline and structure
• Limit work in progress rather than work per
time
• Improve responsiveness, through reduction in
Lead Time
• Can accommodate unexpected work without
modifying the system
• Always able to work on the next most
important or risky task

15. Kanban fundamentals
• Visualise the workflow
• Split the work down into small pieces
• Represent each work item on a post it and put on the board
• Use named columns to express where the work item is in the
workflow
• Limit Work in Progress
• Assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress in
each workflow state, or set of states
• Measure the lead time (average time to complete one
item)
• Optimise the process, aiming to make the Lead Time as small
and as predictable as possible

16. The Board
• Should reflect your real working practices
• Placement of the board is crucial
• Work in progress limits drive behaviour
• Start with loose, achievable limits and expect
to fine tune
• Expect the board to change state on a daily
basis

17. A simple example

18. A more complicated example

19. The post its

20. How to measure lead time and
optimise the process?

21. Cumulative Flow Diagram
Aslak Hellesøy

22. Lead Time

23. Lessons Learned

24. Lessons Learned
• Benefits
• Greater flexibility in our work flow
• We no longer feel that we are fighting our process
• Better able to embrace and support unexpected
work items
• Negatives
• Greater discipline is required in ensuring that all
tasks are completed in a timely manner

25. Lessons Learned
Protect yourself. If you make the team better able
to take on ad-hoc tasks, you must track the
impact and the load.
I have found the following categorisations to be
effective
• Planned Product Development work
• Planned Engineering work e.g. large scale refactoring
• Unplanned Product work e.g. one of reports, small
tweaks to behaviour
• Unplanned engineering work e.g. urgent bug fixes

26. Lessons Learned
• Further observations
• Adoption was almost completely painless
• Due to day to day interaction, the board takes on
a much more important role than it ever did under
scrum
• The team is more confident in deciding what to do
next
• Our stand ups have become much more focused
• Our retrospectives are no longer coupled to the
period of our iteration.

27. Is Kanban for you?
You may find value in Kanban over Scrum if:-
• The team has support, maintenance or Dev Ops
responsibilities
• Time boxed iterations make little sense in your work
flow
• Your priorities change rapidly
• Your organisation is unable to easily support Scrum
roles
You may also want to consider hybrid approaches such as
‘Scrumban’

28. Scrum
Kanban
Lessons Learned

29. Wrapping up
• Scrum provided us with structure and discipline
• Kanban provided a better model for our work
flow by embracing the unexpected and doing
away with iterations
• Limiting work in progress makes it easier to
consider team level task prioritisation
• Ad-hoc work stacks up, categorise all work items
• Kanban is a tool, as is Scrum. Use the right tool
for the job.

30. And Finally…..
• Contact
• neil@fragile.org.uk
• http://fragile.org.uk/
• @neilisfragile
• References
• http://open.bekk.no/2009/11/03/cumulative-
flow-diagrams-with-google-spreadsheets/
• http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/Kanban-vs-
Scrum.pdf