agile

Hey! How are you guys?

This is Anatoly from Define Agile, and today we’re talking about Kanban vs. Scrum.

A lot of people ask me:

  What’s the difference between those two and when should you use one over the other?

Today I want to take a couple of minutes to explain to you this. I hope it will bring you value.

Kanban and Scrum are both Agile frameworks. They’re under the Agile umbrella. They both help our teams to become more efficient, to promote Agile, to work in an iterative manner.

But what’s the difference between the two?

Let’s take two simple examples. I’m a software developer and I work in an IT company. How would my day look like if I would do Kanban or I would do Scrum?

Kanban example

I come to work in the morning and my team does Kanban. I will probably have a board which is called Kanban board. It can be a digital board or it can be a physical board. I have tickets in this board and my sole job will be to take just one of those tickets, to move it across the swimming lanes  from “To do” to “Done.”

Do I have many meetings? Nope.

In Kanban there is not a lot of structure, or should I say – you work with what you have.

Scrum example

Now let’s talk about Scrum. Scrum is a little bit more involved. I come to work in the morning. I will probably have a stand-up meeting which will be  15-minutes. During standup I will meet with my team; We will talk about what we did yesterday, what we are going to do today, and if there are any blockers.

We’ll also work in the intervals.

Our intervals could be two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. Intervals are called Sprints in Scrum. At the start of the Sprint, we will have  a planning meeting where we’ll estimate some work and see how many issues we can take in this interval. In the end, we’ll have a retrospective or we’ll see how we did.

We’ll talk about what we can improve, how we can grow the team. Also, we’ll have a demo where we’ll invite stakeholders, show them what we did and see if they have any feedback and if we need to change anything in the process.

So as you might see, Kanban and Scrum are different. Scrum requires more overhead while Kanban has less overhead. But the question people ask me is:

“Anatoly, when should I choose one over the other?”   

That’s a great question.

First of all, I think how mature the team is. If the team is already mature, they work well together, they have a nice gel there,  they do not require a lot of meetings, they are on time in every step of their work and they’re doing Kanban – let’s continue what works. I never ask people to change what works.

If it’s a brand new team and they don’t know what to do and they just ask me, “Anatoly, which framework should we choose?” I usually say, “Scrum”. I say Scrum because I want people to communicate more, I want people to be engaged, I want people to constantly give feedback to each other and understand how they can work together as one big, efficient team.

So, for more mature teams, Kanban. For new teams, less mature teams, for teams that have some inefficiencies, I would suggest Scrum. (Note: of course those are not the only criteria, I also look at how work gets sent to teams, how eager is team to move to new framework etc)

Also, mind you that lots of teams move from Scrum to Kanban when they become more mature because they don’t really need more of this overhead.

Thank you for watching/reading. I hope I was able to bring you value today. If you have any questions or comments, please ask them here or on Youtube, Linkedin. Subscribe to my newsletter to get latest blog posts and videos! We are releasing them every week!

This was Anatoly from Define Agile.

Bye-bye.

P.S. If you want me to help you to move your teams to Scrum or Kanban, or introduce Agile to your whole team, please go to DefineAgile and schedule a free consultation!