Scrumban Beyond Teams

  Agile   Scrum   Strategy   ProjectsAtWork  

The principles and practices of Scrumban can go beyond helping teams improve performance. Here are four levels that Scrumban can be employed, from teams and departments to programs and portfolios. This understanding can be a starting point for its adoption across the entire organization.

When introducing Scrumban as a concept, it’s easy to think of its principles and practices as limited to the development team environment. However, Scrumban’s principles and practices can and should extend across many layers of the organization. Introducing these principles to the broader organization requires different approaches and skills.

I find the concept of Kanban Method flight levels developed by Klaus Leopold a helpful guide. He created this paradigm as a way to communicate why the Kanban Method framework is far more effective when used beyond individual team boundaries. The four “flight levels” he defined are equally germane to Scrumban frameworks:

Level 1: No Input Coordination

Scrumban is applied within an organizational unit such as a team or department, and is often characterized by highly specialized persons working together, such as cross-functional teams working on a small product or subsystem. At this level, work is “thrown over the fence.” There’s no coordinated replenishment of incoming work. The units often serve numerous …

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