Scrum, Kanban or Scrumban: When, Why and How?

Vandana Roy is an agile practitioner who eagerly learns and implements new methods and techniques with teams. Her goal: greater productivity, team and customer satisfaction. In her seven years in the IT industry, Vandana has gained experience in all phases of a project, and is well practiced in knowing what can help and hinder teams. She holds PMP, CSM and CSP certifications. In the five years she has been implementing agile with teams, assignments have been with large organizations that included Liberty Mutual, Guideone Insurance, PayPal and Visa. Her experience ranges from coaching teams who were new to agile to those who are experts. Importantly, she has helped teams and upper management become convinced that Scrum and Kanban work.

  Agile   Scrum  

Lately, I hear these questions a lot: “Is Scrum better, or Kanban?”, “What is more suitable for my project, Kanban or Scrum?” Such questions--and sometimes the responses--put managers in a dilemma about which framework to embrace. Each has its own benefits and tales of success stories.

Before analyzing the benefits of Scrum and Kanban, here’s a summary of each framework…

Scrum in a Nutshell
The Scrum Alliance defines Scrum as an agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple.

Scrum emphasizes team collaboration and provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation on solving what might otherwise seem to be an insurmountable challenge.

Scrum gives power to business to prioritize requirements and to even change requirements. At the same time, it gives power to the team to commit to requirements according to its capability. All the work done in Scrum is iterative and incremental, and it time boxes the process--i.e., it allocates a fixed time period to each planned activity, typically anywhere from one to four weeks.Scrum also emphasizes getting feedback…

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