Scrum and Kanban — Stronger Together
The case for combining Scrum and Kanban rather than choosing between them — and the co-development story behind Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK).
Click image to open full size Over the years I’ve been leading the charge when it comes to creating mashups and hybrids of approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, whatever.
Mashups and hybrids can be very attractive, because they can be an excuse for taking what you like from each approach and leaving behind the hard stuff. In mashing up approaches you need to make sure whatever set of practices you end up with is cohesive and effective. Coming up with the smallest set of practices that is still cohesive and comprehensive, and brings in the best of the Scrum iterative world and the Kanban flow-oriented world, is the result of years of work in the trenches.
Bridging the two worlds
I recently started working with Steve Porter, Dave West and others at Scrum.org, as well as Daniel Vacanti of Actionable Agile, on bridging the Scrum and Kanban worlds. We believe the time is right to put behind us the arguments around which approach is better, and help both Kanban and Scrum practitioners realize that they are actually stronger together.
Steve and Daniel wrote the first blog in the series — Scrum and Kanban — Stronger Together.
I wrote the second one, a Kanban primer for Scrum teams, with concrete suggestions for practices you might want to add as experiments to your Scrum process.
Helping Scrum teams add some Kanban and flow to their mix is one of my favorite gigs.
Update: Scrum.org announced a new class, Professional Scrum with Kanban. That is one of the major goals we were working towards, and we believe it can potentially become a significant bridge between the Kanban and Scrum worlds.
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- 01 Actively Managing Portfolio Flow 2 min
- 02 Flow Metrics for Scrum: See Stuck Work Early 6 min
- 03 Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams Publications