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Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

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Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#21

Post by Huggernaut »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #17
patrickmay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to tighten up your standups. Each person should be saying what they did yesterday, what they're going to do today, and identify any dependencies or blockers. It's important for everyone on the team to know what others are doing in order to share knowledge. If people are zoning out, you're not getting that benefit.

Yes but either you don't know what they're talking about (different part of the project), or already know what they're talking about (because you are a tight team). So, zone out. Who's the Punch and Judy show for?

At least where I work (Pivotal) where we are often rotating between pairs, and changing tracks of work in the order of every day to every few days, being kept up to date on the state of the rest of the work is useful.

Additionally, we use it as a chance to bring up anything we need help with, or anything we found interesting in the last day, which wasn't important enough to interrupt the rest of the team with.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#22

Post by cmdkeen »

regularfry wrote: post #10
gjmulhol wrote: post #2

I love this. We briefly flirted with scrum but now just have a much more Kanban-like system now, too. The only issue I foresee long term is that the sprint mentality of Scrum might recharge people and get them to, well, sprint, at product goals. Kanban, because it is never ending, might start to feel like a slog. There is never a way to have that feeling of "wow, we crushed it and cleared out our list. We are awesome…

I see it the other way round. We're doing Scrum (ish, I guess) right now, and the see-saw between either ending a sprint with a couple of late-night panic sessions to get everything out of the door, or ending it with most of the team kicking their heels with one pair still going up to the deadline is what feels like the slog. I see Kanban as much smoother: I don't see artificial, self-imposed crunch mode every fortni…

The crunch approach to sprints is the killer. If you know you can't complete all the work in a sprint the answer should not be to bust yourself to try and complete it. Have a conversation with yourselves and the product owner to readdress what you can realistically achieve in the time remaining and then do that.

It's a really hard thing to do, we all want to be the hero that saves the sprint. It also encourages you to end up with lots of discrete chunks of work in a sprint so you can complete 80% of your initial commitment and salvage a sense of achievement rather than getting 80% through a few big tasks but none of them actually done.

A sprint with 4 developers and 4 tasks each estimated to take 2 weeks will almost never succeed. A sprint with 4 developers and 20 tasks each estimated to take a day or two stands a much better chance of success. Combine that with some metrics around "complexity per developer per available day" and you quickly end up with some charts showing productivity that is hopefully improving which will hopefully improve morale.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#23

Post by sandGorgon »

regularfry wrote: post #10
gjmulhol wrote: post #2

I love this. We briefly flirted with scrum but now just have a much more Kanban-like system now, too. The only issue I foresee long term is that the sprint mentality of Scrum might recharge people and get them to, well, sprint, at product goals. Kanban, because it is never ending, might start to feel like a slog. There is never a way to have that feeling of "wow, we crushed it and cleared out our list. We are awesome…

I see it the other way round. We're doing Scrum (ish, I guess) right now, and the see-saw between either ending a sprint with a couple of late-night panic sessions to get everything out of the door, or ending it with most of the team kicking their heels with one pair still going up to the deadline is what feels like the slog. I see Kanban as much smoother: I don't see artificial, self-imposed crunch mode every fortni…

in that case, do you use retrospectives at all ? if you dont have a goal post, then how do you retrospect.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#24

Post by andylei »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #17
patrickmay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to tighten up your standups. Each person should be saying what they did yesterday, what they're going to do today, and identify any dependencies or blockers. It's important for everyone on the team to know what others are doing in order to share knowledge. If people are zoning out, you're not getting that benefit.

Yes but either you don't know what they're talking about (different part of the project), or already know what they're talking about (because you are a tight team). So, zone out. Who's the Punch and Judy show for?

you are in between those 2 extremes and standups are useful?

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#25

Post by alistairSH »

danmaz74 wrote: post #11
seanwilson wrote: post #9

> The rituals, mainly the standups and grooming sessions, were fantastic. Standups are a great way to keep everyone aligned on the work. Can anyone elaborate why they find standups useful? The planning board should already communicate what's being done, what's been done and why people are blocked. I only find them helpful if some people in the team generally don't communicate well what they're up to (e.g. during dail…

> I find most people zone out during the standup Out of curiosity, how long do your standups last? How big is the team?

I'm a project manager/scrum master, with a team that varies from 6 to 12 (roughly half the team is semi-permanently on-loan to other related projects/teams).

My daily stand-up is usually 5-10 minutes. About 5 minutes of the standard "what I did, what I plan to do, and what's in my way". And 0-5 minutes of resolving problems (figuring out if I need to escalate, or if another team needs to be involved, etc). Anything longer than that, and we schedule follow-up meetings with a more correct set of attendees.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#26

Post by smileysteve »

danmaz74 wrote: post #11
seanwilson wrote: post #9

> The rituals, mainly the standups and grooming sessions, were fantastic. Standups are a great way to keep everyone aligned on the work. Can anyone elaborate why they find standups useful? The planning board should already communicate what's being done, what's been done and why people are blocked. I only find them helpful if some people in the team generally don't communicate well what they're up to (e.g. during dail…

> I find most people zone out during the standup Out of curiosity, how long do your standups last? How big is the team?

15 (goal) minutes with a 10 person team.

Everybody didn't zone out every day, but most did, most of the time.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#27

Post by peterbell_nyc »

cmdkeen wrote: post #19
vincentkriek wrote: post #15

I really like KanBan and think it's a better fit for a lot of teams than SCRUM is. SCRUM works great for teams which have a stable backlog of work and an incidental problem that might pop up. If you can't keep a backlog stable for three weeks, you shouldn't do scrum. KanBan allows you to pick and choose practices from scrum that do add value, and ignore the ones you are just doing to follow the book. I worked in a te…

If you can't keep a backlog stable for a few weeks then you aren't doing project work you're on support or firefighting. Scrum is all about IT project work, Kanban is a more general "efficiently get a pile of tasks done" process which can apply to small IT tasks or building a car.

Depends where you are in your product lifecycle. Pre-product market fit, it's often a bad idea to build and keep a stable backlog a few weeks in length.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#28

Post by alistairSH »

regularfry wrote: post #10
gjmulhol wrote: post #2

I love this. We briefly flirted with scrum but now just have a much more Kanban-like system now, too. The only issue I foresee long term is that the sprint mentality of Scrum might recharge people and get them to, well, sprint, at product goals. Kanban, because it is never ending, might start to feel like a slog. There is never a way to have that feeling of "wow, we crushed it and cleared out our list. We are awesome…

I see it the other way round. We're doing Scrum (ish, I guess) right now, and the see-saw between either ending a sprint with a couple of late-night panic sessions to get everything out of the door, or ending it with most of the team kicking their heels with one pair still going up to the deadline is what feels like the slog. I see Kanban as much smoother: I don't see artificial, self-imposed crunch mode every fortni…

...ending a sprint with a couple of late-night panic sessions to get everything out of the door...

My first reaction is you are not sufficiently grooming your backlog. Stories are left too large, with too many unknowns. If you tend to have a small number of large tasks, this is likely the case.

That, or you just aren't very good at estimating. A large number of small tasks would indicate this problem.

In the second case, you need to circle back with the PO and discuss which items can push to the next sprint. And make a concerted effort to estimate better during grooming and planning sessions.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#29

Post by darkerside »

Was the author's team just totally lacking a leader who could point out the patterns in underestimating the scope of work. If you are consistently missing your estimates, you adjust. Get to a point where you are consistently under-promising, and over-delivering. Morale problem solved. It's not rocket science.

That said, I agree that regular timelines aren't the only way to create a sense of urgency in your team.

Re: Ditching Scrum for Kanban - The best decision we’ve made as a team

#30

Post by JoeAltmaier »

andylei wrote: post #24
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but either you don't know what they're talking about (different part of the project), or already know what they're talking about (because you are a tight team). So, zone out. Who's the Punch and Judy show for?

you are in between those 2 extremes and standups are useful?

Right - some fraction of the team isn't zoned out, sure. Maybe working on the communication skills of those remaining ones is a better idea, than derailing everybody for a standup.
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