kanban

Can Scrum be used in a Law Firm?

Hey guys, Anatoly from Define Agile. Here I’m answering your questions. These two questions came from Nacho Martinez.

He asks:

“What’s your opinion about applying Agile Project Management, Scrum, Kanban in legal firms?”

That’s a great question. Yes, you can definitely apply Scrum and Kanban to not only software development projects but such things as legal firms or any other projects, because it teaches you to respond to change. For example, in a Legal Firm you can have a Kanban board for different legal cases. You can move them from to-do to done. You can visualize your work. You can limit your work in progress so that you don’t take too many cases at the same time . This would be a quick example how Kanban can help you with your legal practice. Of course there is much more to it.

From Scrum, you can use planning. When you plan, what you’re going to work on with your team on this upcoming week or two weeks or a month.You can have retrospectives, where you talk about your current processes, and what can be improved. You can also have daily standup to catch, reviews to review your work – etc. Scrum is a good choice here.

So, yes, you can definitely apply those principles from Scrum and Kanban to legal firms. If you need my help, I’ll be happy to help you with that. We work with not only software teams but all other teams that you can think of. So if you need my help, go to DefineAgile.com. Let’s get you a free consultation and help you out.

The other question was:

“What exactly is the difference between Lean and those two methodologies from the perspective of a legal business?”

First of all, Lean is more mindset than a framework. Lean is about testing your assumptions, delivering Minimum Viable Product, improving, testing again, while Scrum and Kanban are frameworks how to implement Agile. This is the difference. These two can be combined together. You can definitely use Lean mindset to always change, to always improve, to always show progress, and you should.

Hope that helps!

School of Agile

Scrum Master Interview Questions: 3 Most Important Questions to Ask

Hi guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here again. Today we’re talking about three questions you can ask a Scrum Master to understand if he/she is a good fit.

Question #1: What was your worst day at work?

You will tell me, “Anatoly, how does it relates to a Scrum Master?” Okay, let me explain. First of all, Scrum Master is a person who brings Agile into an organization, usually helps organization to transform to Agile. When you work with a constant change and tasked with transformation you deal with lots of conflicts and stress. So if a person doesn’t have enough experience dealing with the high stress situation, it will be very hard for this person to be successful at the job.

I find that people who tell me that they had a really bad time at work and then they were able to overcome it and they still love this work, those are the people that I want to see next to me working as Scrum Masters. If people didn’t have any major stressful change-related experiences in their career yet, I might find that they don’t have enough experience for them to join my team.

Question #2: Tell me the difference between Kanban and Scrum, and when you should use one or the other.

You’ll tell me again, “Anatoly, why would a Scrum Master know about Kanban? Why should he/she care?” You care for the sole reason that the Scrum Master needs to be a well-rounded person who looks around and understands all the other frameworks that are there and makes sure that the Scrum Master can make an educated decision which one to choose. So if a Scrum Master always works in his/her small box of Scrum and not looking around what is happening in the industry, I don’t think he’s the right person.

Question #3: What was the change that you introduced to the team and how did you do that?

This is very important, because the Scrum Master comes to the team and often introduces lots of things that the Scrum Master thinks is right. If you don’t introduce them well, if you force something on people, it won’t work and then you won’t have any good relationship with your team. The Scrum Master is there to support the team, to advice things, and a good Scrum Master should be able to explain to you how he made sure that everyone understood that the change is good and how he rallied people around the change and made sure they implement in such a way that everyone is happy.

These are my three questions I usually ask every Scrum Master.

School of Agile

Differences between Kanban and Scrum

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!