Convivio Cookbook
  • Introduction
  • Our Business
    • The Convivio brand
    • What do we do?
    • Our work for clients
    • Our Purpose
    • Our Pulse
      • Big Rocks
      • Problems
    • Company Policies
      • Environmental Policy
      • Anti-Bribery Policy
      • Fair Tax Policy
        • Dividends policy
        • 2020 Results and Tax
        • 2019 Results and Tax
        • 2018 Results and Tax
        • 2017 Results and Tax
  • Our Team
    • Help! I'm new. How do I get started?
    • Starting at Convivio
    • Staff Benefits
    • Being a buddy
    • Having a buddy
    • Free-Range Working
    • Convivio Fridays
    • Notes: give & receive feedback
    • Security Screening
    • Submit Expenses
    • Purchases
    • Your home working environment
    • People Analytics
    • Recruitment
      • Help Card: Writing a Person Profile
      • Help Card: Writing a Job Description and Advert
      • Help Card: Publishing a Job Advert
      • Help Card: Reviewing CVs
      • Help Card: Preparing and Conducting Structured Interviews
      • Help Card: Preparing and Conducting Remote Working Interviews
    • Team Policies
      • Security Policy
        • Acceptable Use Policy
        • Business Continuity Management
        • Data Usage Policy
        • Document Access Policy
        • Mobile Equipment Policy
        • Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
        • VPN Guide
      • Equal Opportunities
      • Grievance Procedure
      • Disciplinary Procedure
    • Taking time off work
      • Holiday
      • Sickness
    • Peer reviews
    • Mental Health
      • Mental Health Training
      • Mental Health First Aid
      • Returning to work
      • Resources
    • Continuing Professional Development
      • CPD Annual Planning
      • CPD Sprints & Scrums
      • CPD Annual Review
      • CPD Annual Retrospective
  • Our Clients
    • Principles For Building New Client Relationships
    • Researching
    • Connecting
    • Nurturing
    • Assessing
    • Learning and Thinking
    • Pre-qualification questionnaires
    • Proposing
    • Agreeing
    • Beginning
    • Inspiration
  • Our Marketing
    • Content Publishing
      • Git Repository Conventions
      • Help Card: Writing a Case Study
    • Brand Guidelines
      • Content Guidelines
      • Branded Documents and Reports
  • Our Tools
    • Infrastructure
      • External Firewalls
  • Internal Projects
    • How we improve our business
  • Client Projects
    • Delivery Launch
    • Delivery Team
      • Convivio People
      • The Coach
      • User Researcher
      • Other Team Members
    • Digital Strategy
    • Discovery
      • Discovery Briefing
      • Discovery Planning
      • Discovery Modules
      • Discovery Findings
      • Discovery Principles
      • Prepare for prototyping
    • Prototyping
      • Inputs to Prototyping
      • Prototyping Objectives
      • Prototyping Inception
      • Prototyping Sprints
      • Prototyping Outputs
    • Build
      • Inputs to Build
      • Build Kickoff
      • User Stories
      • Backlog Management
      • Backlog Scouting
      • Sprint Planning
      • Sprinting
        • Daily Standup
        • Story Lifecycle
        • Design in Sprints
        • User Testing in Sprints
        • Quality Control in Sprints
      • Sprint Review
      • Sprint Retrospective
    • Service Management
    • Digital Service Standards
      • Delivery Methodologies
        • Scrum
        • Kanban
        • Lean
          • Technical Standards
        • Code Quality
        • Testing
        • Automation
          • Security Standards
          • Quality Standards
          • Risk Standards
    • Delivery Governance
      • Steering Group
      • Risk Management
        • Risk Attitude
        • Assessing Risks
    • Delivery Help Cards
      • Help Card - Sprint Planning
      • Help Card - Sprint Review
      • Help Card - Sprint Retrospective
      • Help Card - Product Owner Feedback
      • Help Card - Common Issues
      • Help Card - Slack
      • Help Card - Github
      • Help Card - Trello
  • Our Recipes
    • Convivio Classic Cocktails
      • Ingredients
      • Tips and Techniques
      • Martini
      • Negroni
      • Manhattan
      • Old Fashioned
    • Potage Dubarry (or, creamy cauliflower soup) with spiced green pepper
    • Roasted Sweet Potato in a Herb and Nut Salad, with Maple Chilli Dressing
    • Aubergine Curry
    • Vegetarian Paella
    • Easy Ice Cream
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On this page
  • States
  • Work in Progress (WIP)
  • Kanban or Scrum?
  1. Client Projects
  2. Digital Service Standards
  3. Delivery Methodologies

Kanban

PreviousScrumNextLean

Last updated 7 years ago

What is Kanban? Why do we use Scrum and not this?

Kanban is neither a framework (like Scrum) nor a methodology (like PRINCE2). Instead it’s a simply a model for implementing change through incremental improvements.

States

With Kanban you organise your work on a Kanban board. The board has a series of columns, each one a work state that your stories pass through, left to right, as they’re developed. These columns, or states, can include development, review, QA, done. You can also have sub-states within a state. For example, the development state might have ready, in progress and don as its sub-states.

Work in Progress (WIP)

WIP is a Kanban control. For each state on the Kanban board you must specify a WIP limit. That is, the maximum number of items, or stories, that are allowed in that state at any one time. If a state reaches its limit then no new work can pass into that state until room is freed up.

Setting a maximum WIP for a state can be good news for many Agile teams. This control means that there can be no flexibility for a client to be continually pushing more and more into the queue. Before more work can be pushed into the required state it’s the team’s responsibility to complete the work in the maximum state, to free up the state and get things moving.

With Scrum it’s all too easy in a sprint to end up spinning too many plates. When you have multiple strands of work on the go then you can suffer from context-switching. This happens when you’re bouncing between multiple stories, not concentrating for long enough on a single task and not performing efficiently.

With a WIP limit the team needs to stop what it’s doing and concentrate on the bottleneck. They need to work together to complete whatever work is clogging up the workflow and get the work flowing properly again. This also serves to maintain a more constant stream of work and helps avoid those last minute sprint panics when EVERYTHING needs to be tested, reviewed or approved!

Kanban or Scrum?

As I mentioned earlier, Kanban is not a framework. We don’t need to choose between it and Scrum. Kanban is a model that can be applied to existing processes.

Kanban can compliment Scrum. With Scrum we accept stories into a sprint backlog and we work on those over the course of, say, two weeks. If you’re struggling to deal with the many spinning plates that introduces, particularly if you have a large delivery team or if you need to exert control over a demanding client, then integrating Kanban into the mix is a great way to control things.

So, it’s not a question of "Kanban or Scrum?” The question is "Scrum or Scrum with Kanban controls?"

Kanban board in action