Kanban for Agile Teams Whitepaper
This paper has been a long time coming. The first draft of this was written while I was still at VersionOne. I pulled Dennis in to add his expertise and put some final touches on the content. We got the paper delivered, but it stalled on a technical debate over the definition of Lead Time vs. Cycle Time. The issues are finally resolved and the paper is ready for download.
Head over to the VersionOne site, download the paper, and let me know what you think. Here is the abstract:
Kanban has recently become popular with many project teams because of its ease of implementation, use of visual controls, ability to accommodate a wide variety of organizational design patterns, integration of stakeholders and relentless focus on the continuous delivery of value. Many development teams have found success with Kanban when more mainstream agile practices did not yield acceptable outcomes.
Organizations that are interested in adopting or improving agile methods should evaluate the underlying principles behind Kanban and how the principles can work together with more traditional agile methodologies. While there are meaningful differences between agile and Kanban, many teams will find that blending the two approaches can create tremendous value for their organization.
Comment (1)
Dave
Thanks, I've been curious about how Kanban relates to Scrum, particularly as Kanban is getting a lot of press. But please can you add some pictures to your whitepaper – even some freehand back-of-an-envelope stuff would be useful. A picture is worth a thousand words after all and the text certainly lends itself to illustration.