Project Management

Please login or join to subscribe to this thread

Do Scrum and Kanban models help in reducing multitasking and waste?

linkedin twitter facebook  
avatar
Gaurav Dhooper Assistant Vice President| Genpact Noida, U.P., India
Scrum is a time boxed delivery framework and Kanban is a JIT model. If these models are implemented effectively, do they help in reducing multitasking and waste? Please share your valuable thoughts.
Sort By:
< 1 2 >
avatar
Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina
Please let me say with all my due respect that you are mixing things: Scum is a framework to create something and Kanban is a techinique you can use for example as part of Scrum. Second, answer your question, Not At All. Reduce wasted or multitaking is a superior level of abstraction.
avatar
DORA LUZ Mejia CEO| IT Explore Envigado, Antioquia, Colombia
Agree with most of the contributions saying tht is not about using scrum or kanban that you are going to reduce multitasking. Lean Principle is reducing multitasking and Agile focus is also motivating teams to one think at the time.. Scrum do not contribute to multitasking issues. Kanban works also with WIP concep trying to motivate the team that we need to reduce the WIP.
avoding multitasking is a team issue. you can have a team using kanban techniques and lean and having troubles with multitasking.
avatar
Gaurav Dhooper Assistant Vice President| Genpact Noida, U.P., India
Thank you all for sharing your valuable perspective. It really helps.
avatar
Manish Prasad Gurgaon, Haryana, India
I agree with Sergio. Scrum is a methodology for developing couple of features every sprint. Kanban method basically forces people not to pick multiple items in parallel & instead get couple of items closed with team members before picking another feature. This is managed via WIP Limit. Retrospective ceremony definitely helps in identifying what went good & what went bad so over a period of time, waste is slowly reduced from the system. Technically if we run Scrum & have Kanban principle within it than productivity along with quality can increase drastically or in other words, velocity will increase.
avatar
Adrian Carlogea Australia
From experience I have seen that Scrum produces a lot of waste.

Example. At one sprint a story asks for the creation of a report in the application. Done

In another sprint a new report is requested but because the developer who wrote the code for the first report was not aware of future reports his code was not written in a way to easily allow adding new reports. This makes the development of the 2nd report hard and time consuming.

Later on in a another sprint a 3rd similar report is requested by a US. Since the code is already in a big mess following the 2nd report the developer has no other option than throwing away all the work that has been done so far then write an API for creating reports, rewrite the code for the first two reports to use the new API and in the end write the code for the 3rd one.

This is the consequence of splitting the work in small "manageable" peaces. If the requirements about the reports had been presented detailed in a big requirements document this had never happened.
...
1 reply by Wade Harshman
Jun 24, 2019 8:24 AM
Wade Harshman
...
It's not the scrum framework that's producing these problems, it's the lack of collaboration.

You stated that the developer was not aware that there'd be new reports, and should have written the code to allow new reports to be easily added. That should have been communicated early on. It sounds like this developer was simply assigned a story with no collaboration or context; that is not the way agile development works. If you use user stories, then your developers need to be directly involved in story writing, backlog refinement, and sprint planning so they know what the customer wants.

Scrum, as stated earlier, won't fix this for you, but it will reveal the issue.
avatar
Wade Harshman Scrum Master| GDIT Indianapolis, In, United States
Jun 23, 2019 1:03 PM
Replying to Adrian Carlogea
...
From experience I have seen that Scrum produces a lot of waste.

Example. At one sprint a story asks for the creation of a report in the application. Done

In another sprint a new report is requested but because the developer who wrote the code for the first report was not aware of future reports his code was not written in a way to easily allow adding new reports. This makes the development of the 2nd report hard and time consuming.

Later on in a another sprint a 3rd similar report is requested by a US. Since the code is already in a big mess following the 2nd report the developer has no other option than throwing away all the work that has been done so far then write an API for creating reports, rewrite the code for the first two reports to use the new API and in the end write the code for the 3rd one.

This is the consequence of splitting the work in small "manageable" peaces. If the requirements about the reports had been presented detailed in a big requirements document this had never happened.
It's not the scrum framework that's producing these problems, it's the lack of collaboration.

You stated that the developer was not aware that there'd be new reports, and should have written the code to allow new reports to be easily added. That should have been communicated early on. It sounds like this developer was simply assigned a story with no collaboration or context; that is not the way agile development works. If you use user stories, then your developers need to be directly involved in story writing, backlog refinement, and sprint planning so they know what the customer wants.

Scrum, as stated earlier, won't fix this for you, but it will reveal the issue.
< 1 2 >

Please login or join to reply

Content ID:
ADVERTISEMENTS

"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night."

- Steve Martin

ADVERTISEMENT

Sponsors







Vendor Events

See all Vendor Events

Newsletters

Jun 3: The Career Problem Facing New PMs
May 20: Your PM Career as a Project Life Cycle
May 13: The Big Lie After Layoffs

See all newsletters