Timebox or Kanban: A False Dichotomy

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Schedule Management   Scheduling  

“I want to move to agile. Or lean. I don’t know which. I just know I have to show progress more often. I want to be able to adapt to changing conditions. That means I have to choose between timeboxes or Kanban, right?”– a confused project manager, on the verge of adopting a more agile approach.

Some project teams are devoted to their timeboxes. Some teams are devoted to their Kanban boards. But you don’t have to exclusively choose one or the other. Timeboxes and Kanban boards are tools to ensure that you limit the work in progress and that you limit the size of the work. You can use either or both, and find value in both.

For those of you who aren’t sure what a timebox or a Kanban board is, here’s the quick explanation: A timebox is a specific amount of time in which you decide to achieve some result. I use five-minute timeboxes to clean my office, since I hate that work. Teams that use stand-ups timebox their meetings to 15 minutes to define the end of their meetings. No matter what, their meetings finish at the end of their 15-minute timebox.

A project team may use a one- or two-week timebox for an iteration. The key is that once you commit to a timebox, you never extend it. By definition, the team stops working when the timebox is done. If the team was unable to complete the work and meet the acceptance criteria, that&…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.