Have you been listening to the sentence “working in an Agile environment” lately? Are you going to start working with a SCRUM team? But, what is the difference between Kanban vs Scrum?
Different projects have different needs. That sounds quite obvious so, according to the project you are going to start, the work methodology that best applies can be: Kanban, Scrum or even the traditional method: Waterfall. It does not involve adapting us to the model, but looking for the appropriate model for each type of project.
How can I choose the best framework?
I can help you with this. In this post, I propose you a path (yes, it is a diagram) that will guide you in deciding which framework will help you give more value to the client.
What has come out? Does it fit you?
It is important to understand the nature of the product that you want to build and analyze the resources you have… Always thinking that not everything is black or white.
Without losing focus, this culture includes continuous improvement, test, adjust and evolve.
If you have any doubt about the differences between Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall, here you have a short summary with the key concepts.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a framework for agile software development or complex projects. To deepen more I recommend you take a look at this other post with a full glossary ?
It works very well when:
- There is a vision of the objective pursued but the requirements are not defined.
- In application development projects.
- Customer availability to approve, prioritize and define.
- The architecture used is new and can evolve.
- The scope is defined throughout the life of the product / service.
- The success of the product is based on a quick launch and constant evolutions.
- We have a dedicated team, that is, a team that will be working only or in a large percentage of their time for this product / service.
- The dependencies that may exist are not very considerable. Can be managed and do not imply that the team can not advance in other things that add value to the product.
What is Kanban?
Kanban is a method to define, manage and improve services, based on a visual workflow management.
It is based on making visible what is otherwise the work of intangible knowledge. For this, we use some boards that show the flow of the activities to be carried out from the beginning until the end.
Surely you have seen something like this before:
It works very well when:
- Our teams have a high load maintenance Business As Usual (BAU), operations…
- The architecture/bases we work with already exist or do not involve many changes.
- The time estimated of the tasks to be performed are similar or I can group them.
- Almost all team members can perform a task from start to finish.
- I have many requests to attend and I have no vision of the detail of the work I am going to do.
- It is important that we keep a constant rate of delivery without accumulate pending work.
- We must balance capacity with demand.
- The customer knows the capacity of the team and can be informed of the delivery times.
What is Waterfall?
Waterfall is what we call the traditional working method. This methodology is based on the execution of a project sequentially.
The starting point is a list of requirements that the final product has to have. After a first initial phase in which these requirements, designs, etc. are closed, a signed agreement is reached, and the participation of the user (client) is no longer required until the work is finished.
Very detailed planning is done sequentially.
It usually fits very well if:
- If I want to build a bridge or a building.
- We know what you want to achieve, so the requirements are defined at the beginning of the project.
- When I have to meet a very specific scope on a closed date.
- I have many dependencies that block work. This model allows to balance the workload of the team.
- It is more efficient not to have a dedicated team.
- The client does not have much availability.
Sonia Sánchez Sansegundo
Santander Global T&O
Totally convinced and in love with Agile. Positive. Challenge: to help my colleagues to know and experience the Agile so that they enjoy, like me, this experience. Agile Coach
