Lean/Kanban
Kanban promotes flow and reduces cycle-time by limiting WIP and pulling value through in a visible manner:
- There are no iterations: only now. Work at the pace you can truly sustain.
- "Done" means it is in the user’s hands. Nothing less.Limit the Work in Progress (WIP). This forces you to get things done, or you’ll have nothing else to do
- Pull value through (with WIP limit)
- Make it visible (Visual Control)
- Increase throughput
- Fixed Kanban Backlog
- Quality is embedded in (not inspected in)
Some differences Agile/Kanban:
- Iterations vs continuous Flow
- Velocity
- Story commitment vs average cycle time
- Estimation focus
- Homogenous stories
“...a subtle difference between kanban and typical agile processes such as Scrum. Scrum focuses on being agile which may (and should) lead to improving. Kanban focuses on improving, which may lead to being agile. However, being agile itself is not important - it just happens to be the best way we (or at least I) know at the moment.” (quoting Karl Scotland)
Where Is Kanban Working Well?
- IT Application Maintenance
Examples include Microsoft, Corbis, BBC Worldwide - Media Applications
Publishing houses, video, TV, radio, magazines, websites, books. Examples include Authorhouse, BBC, BBC Worldwide, IPC Media, NBCUniversal and Corbis - Games Production
Games appear to have a lot of specialisation and a lot of hand-offs and kanban helps them manage work in progress and flush out issues quickly.
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