Why Kanban is More Agile | Agile Story 21

5 min readMar 6, 2023

Disclaimer: The below are all my personal opinion and does not in any way should be considered as an advice or suggestion. Every organization will have different needs depending on culture, preferences, size, etc.

Following from my earlier article on virtue signaling and agile, we saw how scrum is used as a virtue signal of choice by management. We saw two aspects in scrum i.e., Sprint and Estimates which are mostly misused and agility of the team is sacrificed. At the end of the article, we wanted to see, what are the alternative to overcome those issues. As you might have guessed by now from the title of this article, usage of Kanban as a combination can help the team in a big way. Before diving into the benefits of using the Kanban method lets first understand few of its aspects.

What is Kanban?

Kanban written in Japanese means “signal card”
Kanban written in Chinese means “sign” or “large visual board”
The Kanban method (big K) incorporates both meanings, typically using a kanban system (little K)
Originated from manufacturing — Toyota

Little ‘k’ and Big K

kanban system

Use a board to visualize the workflow
Make process policies explicit
A pull system
Cards allow work to be pulled

Kanban method

Use of a Kanban system with feedback mechanisms and collaborative work
Evolutionary improvement

How a Kanban board looks like

With those definitions out of the way, now let’s look at how Kanban compares to two of the issues of Scrum we listed in the earlier article.

Sprint Vs Continuous Flow

Scrum inserts artificial stopping points in the middle of the development lifecycle. The purpose of the sprints is to remind the team to go back and get feedback from customers at the end of each cycle and use that feedback as input to the next cycle.

While feedback is of utmost importance, the incorrect assumption is that getting customer feedback can (or should) be scheduled on a regular cadence? Instead, Kanban takes a more realistic approach and solicits customer feedback constantly without adding stopping points to slow everything down.

In Kanban, we create a work-item, and we’re always getting customer feedback. The instant the feedback indicates that it’s time to pivot, we just pivot. Sometimes that means throwing away a work-item or changing its direction completely. Most importantly, we can just get our work-item done, we don’t have to break them down artificially, have meetings to talk about burndowns, or pretend we can estimate their duration using t-shirt sizes.

Talking of estimates, lets move to the next issue we mentioned in our earlier article.

Estimates

As we understood in the previous article it is very hard to determine perfect estimate in knowledge work.

Using Kanban and its practices helps us in probabilistic thinking instead of deterministic.

Traditional project managers, aim to arrive at precise deadlines and delivery dates which makes their estimations prone to miscalculations. On the other hand, adopting a probabilistic approach to project delivery embraces variations and turns out highly effective in capturing deviations.

Kanban provides a powerful alternative to estimates, through historical data and a wide range of insightful metrics. The method denounces the deterministic approach to estimating and enables a more probabilistic planning. This is done by creating more predictable processes, analyzing past delivery rates, and deriving possible outcomes that reflect the work variability.

A dashboard that can help stakeholders to forecast about team is FlowViz.

FlowViz is a dashboard for all Agile teams using Azure DevOps/Jira, who want to leverage their data to have better conversations and make more informed decisions. It was built due to years of frustration with ‘velocity’ and other traditional agile metrics. All metrics are centered on the concept of flow, as well as providing forecasting techniques you can use to give customers/receivers greater confidence/transparency in your delivery.

But why even need to do any estimate #NoEstimates. That’s for the next article!

Story 1 A Small Thought with a Big Dot — By Sandip Sengupta

Story 2 Retrospective: Bring our Smiles Back! — By Ajay Padattil

Story 3 Time is of essence! — By Rajiv Banerjee

Story 4 Sustainability with Agility — By Sudipta Chakraborty

Story 5 Awareness > Inspect & Adapt — By Rama Krishna Tadepalli

Story 6 Mommies Guide to Agile — By Sheri D’Souza

Story 7 Agile Manager + High EQ | Need of the Hour — By Rama Krishna Tadepalli

Story 8 Agile Manager + High EQ | Part 2 — By Rama Krishna Tadepalli

Story 9 Yoga & Being Agile — By Sayali Shintre

Story 10 An IT Yogic view on Business Agility — By Rama Krishna Tadepalli

Story 11 Reminisces of a Journey — By Richa Sharma