How can Kanban help Scrum or agile teams develop?

A kanban board is an agile project management tool for visualizing work, limiting work-in-progress, and increasing productivity (or flow). It’s simple to get started with Kanban. If your organization is based on Scrum or SAFe, don’t change anything. However, you can supplement it by implementing Kanban’s six general practices :

• Visualize
• Limit work in progress (WIP)
• Manage flow
• Make policies explicit
• Establish feedback loops
• Improve collaboratively, and evolve experimentally

Visualize: Visualisation is the first step towards making invisible, visible. Once invisible work, workflows, and business risks can be seen, it is possible to manage them better.

Scrum Teams normally have a very simple workflow. “To do,” “Doing,” and “Done” Kanban takes the workflow many steps further by visualizing what is happening from start to finish which includes states like Analyze, Review, Build, and Integrate, test, and Done.

Now you can see which item is preventing progress and how long it has been blocked. It facilitates improved decision-making and increases transparency.

Limit work in progress (WIP): Limiting WIP is one of the core kanban principles. It doesn’t imply you should work less, but it does mean you should work less at the same time. Limiting your work in progress will allow you to do more work in a shorter amount of time.

Reduced lead times can also be achieved by limiting WIP. The fewer activities you have running, the faster things will go. By reducing WIP, you may simply accomplish more in less time.

Manage flow: Flow (or continuous flow) is a condition of perfection that describes a process. With no pauses or downtime, each step in the process adds value. That will allow you to attain a smoother, faster flow, but will also help you identify faults in your process. Everything that does not add value to the customer’s experience is considered waste. When waste is eliminated, the flow improves.

The seven wastes of software development are Partially done work, extra features, hand-offs, Relearning, Task Switching, Delays, and defects.

Make policies explicit: The Kanban system also includes policies governing the entry and exit of work items in each state which helps in creating a pull-based mechanism.

Establish feedback loops: The “manage flow” step includes the implementation of feedback loops. Feedback loops are necessary for the work to flow. They should be sought out and created as needed.

Checking in and integrating your code frequently is a smart strategy to avoid accumulating a lot of integration effort and to gain immediate feedback on the quality of your work so far.

Improve collaboratively, and evolve experimentally: Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally encourages learning and growth through continuous reflection and process enhancements.

A constant sense of competitive danger drives the company to pursue improvement opportunities aggressively. This reinforces a problem-solving culture throughout the organization, where everyone is encouraged to participate in everyday job improvements.