Agile Philly:

Kanban for the rest of us

October 23, 2017

Bob Marini

How We Got Here

1969

Waterfall Development

2000

Scrum: 2005Kanban: 2012

Feb 2, 2015

Strengthened Commitment to Agile

and Lean

The Premise

• There is no standard project management approach that works for all projects.

• The choice of the approach for managing a project depends on various factors such as: • Complexity and type of project,• Experience in conducting similar projects within the

organization, • The Client’s willingness to be involved in the project• The norm in the industry

Traditional PM Methodologies

Traditional

Traditional PM Requires Perfect Vision

Agile, Lean, Scrum, Kanban – What’s the difference ?

Be..

Use n.. N

Do 1.. N

Agile Development

Requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing teams

Characteristics• Adaptive planning,• Evolutionary development, • Early delivery, • Continuous improvement, • Rapid and flexible response to change.

Agile Manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/

Agile Expects Vision Shift

• Eliminate Waste

• Empower the Team (Respect

People)

• Defer Commitment

• Amplify Learning (Build

Knowledge)

• Deliver Fast

• Build Quality In

• See as Whole

Reference:

1. Poppendieck, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, Addison Wesley, 2003

11

1- 4

weeks

What is Kanban:A systemic, lean approach that aligns capacity and work-items across all functions/roles within a software delivery team in order to create “flow”

On Deck DesignIn Prog Done

Test Done

DoneIn ProgCodeSpecifying

In Prog Done

Cycle Time

Essential elements of Kanban are:

Visualizing the flow of work (value stream)

Queues

Pull vs. Push

Limiting work in progress

Explicit Policies

Catalyst for Continuous Improvement

WIP SLAs

* Planning, Review, Retrospectives, Daily meetings not prescribed.

METRICS OF FLOW

Cycle Time – How long does it take to complete a unit of work

Throughput – How many units of work (stories) are completed in a day/week/month

WIP – How much work in progress do I have in the system

Little’s Law

Average Cycle Time = Average WIP

Average Throughput

Scrum v Kanban - Similarities

• Both are Lean and Agile (Kanban has more focus on Lean concepts)

• Both based on pull scheduling (Scrum via Sprint planning , Kanban via Continuous Flow)

• Both limit WIP (Scrum via Sprints , Kanban via WIP)

• Both use transparency to drive process improvement

• Both focus on delivering releasable software early and often

• Both are based on self-organizing teams

• Both require breaking the work into pieces

• In both cases the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity / Lead time and Cycle)

Adapted from Henrik Kniberg

• Considerations• Scrum

• Team like/needs discipline of prescribed ceremonies and timeboxed delivery• Team is new to Agile and Scrum ceremonies instill a sense of discipline• Team is cross-functional• Team is coming from a traditional model• Delivering enhancements on a fixed schedule is a requirement

• Kanban• Support or other queue-based work• Team can release on their own schedule and wants to release as soon as work is

completed• Team can break work down into small batch sizes where each adds value and can

be released independently (if possible)• Team has several specialist roles• Team has responsibility for end-to-end process has tasks outside of software

development• Team wans a focus on Lean / Systems thinking and use lean metrics for

continuous improvement

• Either• Team wants to limit WIP• Team wants to continuously improve

Which One Should I Use ?

Additional Questions / Discussion