Kanban for Scrum Teams

Reviewed by: Madhur Kathuria (CST, CEC, CTC, CSP-D, CSP-SM, CSP-PO, A-CSD, A-CSM, A-CSPO, CAL 1, CSD, CSM, CSPO)

A scrum team can use kanban to visualize the team's flow of work and to provide transparency, which is one of the three empirical pillars of scrum along with inspection and adaptation.

Kanban and scrum are described as agile frameworks, and they aren't really in competition. In fact, they can be complementary, each accentuating key aspects of the other. For example, kanban boards provide the transparency and data needed for inspection and adaptation in scrum. Meanwhile, scrum events like the sprint retrospective can help a kanban team improve the flow of work.

So, scrum teams looking to improve their workflow can certainly use kanban.

What is kanban?

Kanban is an agile project management framework that represents workflow in a simple and clear visual manner. It gives teams a reference point for easily understanding their progress, bottlenecks, completed work, and ultimately understanding their lead time and cycle time. Although originally designed for continuous workflows, kanban boards work equally well with iterative approaches to development or production like scrum. 

Kanban has its origins in the Toyota Production System (TPS), which later came to be known as the "just in time (JIT)" system or "lean manufacturing." Kanban means "signboard" in Japanese, and it's a way to visualize the pull process essential to the Toyota Way. 

The kanban board

The kanban board is the essential artifact of the framework, a board divided into various columns, each indicating the status of work. In its simplest fashion, a kanban might have three columns: "to do," "in progress," and "done." However, teams are encouraged to create the columns necessary for their workflow. For example, a kanban for a complex board game might have a dozen columns with headings like "design," "prototyping," "playtesting," "redesign," "artwork," and more. 

User stories or product backlog items in the workflow are placed on cards, which get pulled from one column to the next by the person working on it. In the game example, each component might have a card: "Player boards," "Tech tree," "action cards," etc., and team members would pull each of these through the columns, pulling new cards from the left-most column as they complete cards on the right-most side of the board. 

The size of the cards relative to the kanban board can be important because it becomes a visual representation of how much work the team should focus on at once. There's only so much space in each of the columns, encouraging the team to focus on the tasks in the working columns to move them on before bringing on more work. This makes it easy to visualize bottlenecks and resolve them to manage flow. 

Limiting work in progress (WIP) and managing workflow

WIP is defined as work items started but not completed. The kanban board is designed to explicitly limit WIP items by limiting the space available in the WIP column or columns.

Teams pull work into these columns when they have created space for the new items by finishing previously started items. Even if there are multiple WIP columns, the team can't simply move tasks forward because tasks can only be moved forward if there is room to do so. They have to make room in forward columns by continuing to advance the item through all the stages. WIP allows teams the room to focus, making it possible to finish something of value before moving on to the next thing. 

Feedback loops and continuous improvement

Kanban emphasizes the goal of continuous improvement, but it doesn't have explicit mechanisms for achieving this improvement. Instead, the team is encouraged to establish feedback loops within the team and from customers to guide improvement. By default, kanban assumes a continuous workflow and allows changes in the workflow to happen at any time. 

What is scrum?

Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps teams deliver value through iterative development and adaptive solutions for complex problems. 

In scrum, a product owner creates an ordered list, called a product backlog, of what is needed to reach a product goal or deliver work in a project. The scrum team selects items from the list to tackle in a single cycle of work known as a sprint. This selection is known as the sprint backlog. When the scrum team completes the sprint backlog, they've created increments of value. Then the team and stakeholders inspect the results and make adjustments for the next iteration. 

Scrum events

The scrum framework is anchored by five events. 

• The sprint: The sprint contains all other events and is truly the heartbeat of scrum. In each sprint, teams will turn a selection of items from the product backlog into increments of value. There is no pause between sprints.

• Sprint planning: This event kicks off the current sprint, and in it, teams select items from the product backlog to be worked on during the sprint. The developers on the scrum team forecast the selection of items—they aren't guaranteeing or committing to getting each and every item done because unforeseen circumstances may change their forecast. But they are saying that they believe they can get them done based on their capacity and other factors.

• Daily scrum: The daily scrum is where team members synchronize by discussing progress, impediments, and other significant developments as they relate to moving work forward and achieving their sprint goal.

• Sprint review: In this event, the team and other stakeholders inspect the work produced and discuss progress toward the product goal. Participants may adjust the product backlog to reflect new information and environmental changes.

• Sprint retrospective: The final event of the sprint allows the team to reflect on the events of the current sprint and decide if they need to adapt their collaboration, interactions, tools, processes, or other aspects of how they get work done and communicate.

How kanban complements scrum

Kanban provides a very simple way for scrum teams to visualize their product backlog, sprint backlog, and progress toward sprint goals and product goals. 

A kanban board is a useful visual aid for each of the scrum events. It helps with transparency and inspection by making all the backlog items easily visible to all team members. Ultimately, it provides data that can be used for adaptation and continuous improvement.

Kanban in sprint planning

In sprint planning, for example, scrum teams can have a column for the product backlog, which they select from to create the sprint backlog in its own column. Items then move from the sprint backlog into the other columns of the board as team members take on work and move it through the development stages. 

The size of the kanban column for the sprint backlog can be a visual shorthand for the team's capacity to help avoid overburdening the team in the sprint. Some teams might even find it useful to use different size cards for story points or other planning shorthands for estimating the size of disparate tasks. 

Kanban in daily scrums

Some scrum teams may find it helpful to have the kanban board at the ready in their daily synchronization. While your focus should be on planning for the day and not on providing a status update for every single card on the board, you and your teammates may find visualization into the work supports your discussion.

We think it's important to prioritize your discussion about collaboration for the day. Don't let perfecting the status of the kanban cards take over your daily scrum, but do consider those cards an optional tool if you need it during this event.

Managing workflow with kanban

Kanban helps teams manage workflow with visualization into work in progress and work remaining in the sprint.

Kanban in sprint review 

In the sprint review, it's easy to look at the product backlog to make adjustments. In kanban boards with dependencies built in, it's also easy to see how adjusting to new information can have a cascading effect through the backlog.

Kanban in sprint retrospective

Kanban provides metrics like turnaround time, cycle time, and lead time, especially once the team has had some time to use the board for a while and create the data defining those metrics. All of this information may be helpful in retrospective conversations with the scrum team.

For example, discussing the possible reasons for a sudden change in cycle time, or seeing a pattern like frequent disruptions that are delaying the team's work in progress.

Remember that the board—or any work board for that matter—is a tool, and it's there to support your team's ability to practice agile principles. If your workboard isn't helping but instead hindering, the retrospective is a good time to discuss possible solutions.

Implementing kanban in a scrum environment

One of the key elements of kanban is that it encourages you to start right where you are—no need to redefine roles.

Scrum teams can start by taking their current workflow and putting it on a kanban board. There might be a column for "sprint backlog" on the leftmost side and one for "meets definition of done" at the rightmost side, with whatever steps the team currently uses in between. Implement pull and WIP limits to ensure started work gets completed before new work is started. 

During the first few sprints trying kanban, the scrum master might have to help the team explicitly limit their WIP and manage their workflow using the kanban. With each retrospective, the team can refine their kanban practices to get better. 

Kanban and scrum are both agile frameworks for managing projects. They're not competing frameworks at all. In fact, the two are complementary and work very well together. Kanban makes it easier for scrum teams to visualize and manage their workflow to reduce bottlenecks and more effectively achieve increments of value. 

It's also easy for scrum teams to implement kanban. It's simple to overlay kanban over the team's current practices, and the two approaches can evolve together through effective implementation of the sprint retrospectives until the team achieves harmony with their hybrid approach.

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