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>Prioritize work correctly and make sure everybody focuses on only the top priorities. It doesn't matter if you are using scrum, kanban, or waterfall. IME it d

by carlmr 3y ago

>Prioritize work correctly and make sure everybody focuses on only the top priorities. It doesn't matter if you are using scrum, kanban, or waterfall. IME it does matter. Kanban is really about focusing on priority and throughput with no frills. Kanban is effective, can be explained in ten minutes, and just works. Most of Kanban really ties in well with Demings ideas, which I think is why it works. Scrum leads to a lot of meetings, ceremony and more "managers" - scrum masters as well as POs, and any other middle management your company had before picking scrum. And when Scrum inevitably fails, the cultists yell that it was implemented wrong, that we never did real Scrum, that if Scrum was done correctly we would succeed. Kind of like "communism was never tried". But it was tried, many times, by many teams, and sometimes despite the system some project somewhere might have thrived. It's a system that only works in an idealized world, with idealized people, that I surmise at this point never existed.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing too much here but people get to hung up, dogmatic, and emotional on processes to have meaningful discussions about this at this point. You can do both Scrum and Kanban and apply the same principals. The underlying principles are actually more important than the process. Kanban is not an excuse to skip planning and having a TODO list full of high priority items is a classic mistake with it. When everything is important, nothing really is. With Scrum the classic mistake is over committing your team based on a notion that managers wants to overload the team because they think that produces results. I treat both processes exactly the same when I put my product manager hat on (I'm also CTO, and a developer): regular planning activity to cherry pick the backlog and populate the TODO column. Pruning unimportant work from the TODO list. Making sure work is prioritized correctly. Scrum light, Kanban, Vaguely Agile, whatever labels you want to put on it works for me. I can scale up or down the scrum ceremonial stuff as needed/demanded.

by carlmr 3y ago

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I'm not disagreeing too much here but people get to hung up, dogmatic, and emotional on processes to have meaningful discussions about this at this point. You can do both Scrum and Kanban and apply the same principals. The underlying principles are actually more important than the process. Kanban is not an excuse to skip planning and having a TODO list full of high priority items is a classic mistake with it. When everything is important, nothing really is. With Scrum the classic mistake is over committing your team based on a notion that managers wants to overload the team because they think that produces results. I treat both processes exactly the same when I put my product manager hat on (I'm also CTO, and a developer): regular planning activity to cherry pick the backlog and populate the TODO column. Pruning unimportant work from the TODO list. Making sure work is prioritized correctly. Scrum light, Kanban, Vaguely Agile, whatever labels you want to put on it works for me. I can scale up or down the scrum ceremonial stuff as needed/demanded.