I spend most of my time coordinating with one other human being at work. After that, I’m coordinating with a maximum of three other people internally, and then with clients.

So take what I’ve got to say about Kanban with a pinch of salt. But I’ve worked at bigger organisations, with more fancy methodologies. Still, nothing beats having a board which shows what’s to do, doing, and done (with some tweaks perhaps for ‘feedback needed’ and ‘undead’!)

Kanban board

I’m not saying Scrum doesn’t work. I’m saying the exact opposite. Scrum does work, but it works for the same reasons Kanban does. The difference between them is that Scrum is slower and more prescriptive, and thus less adaptable (or “agile”, whatever you wanna call it).

[…]

[B]ecause Kanban focuses on tasks rather than sprint-sized batches, it pushes responsibility to the edges of the team, meaning engineers are responsible for going after the pieces of information they need to move forward.

When that happens, instead of designing features by committee, which demands a significant amount of back-and-forth discussions, decisions happen locally, and thus are easier to make.

Additionally, fewer people making decisions lead to fewer assumptions. Fewer assumptions, in turn, lead to shipping smaller pieces of software more quickly, allowing teams to truncate bad paths earlier.

Source: You don’t need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right. | Lucas F. Costa

Image: Visual Thinkery for WAO