Kanban is the MMA of the Agile World

As an experienced Agile Consultant, certified in several methods and frameworks including Scrum, SAFe and Kanban I have a distaste for magical solutions.

Nothing is perfect, everything has flaws.

Yet, I still recommend a Kanban Variation to most of my customers.

Why?

Kanban, contains the wisdom of the Lean movement, and it also knows the powers of Agile. From the Lean side you get the ideas from the Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, the clear thinking of Toyota’s Kanban, and the innovations that came from David Anderson and the many Software Managers that adapted Kanban to knowledge work.

Kanban allows you to improve on any method, or framework, and absorb it into the boards, and the method. The boards can span whole companies, they can be hierarchical, or they can show the work across divisions easily.

Large Kanban Board from Ryan Wetzel’s PSEL Blog

Even better as we showed many years ago, Kanban can easily incorporate Scrum events, and even roles if needed.

We explained this in detail on this article, on the section entitled the Akashi Bridge: here. You can see the tool itself, below, this image shows how a large Kanban board can manage both the flow of work, and also the flow of the Scrum events in a single view, allowing improvements over Scrum, while at the same time operating all the work under the Kanban flow umbrella:

Kanban Board here integrating the best ideas from Scrum into a dual board called the Akashi Bridge.

Like Mixed Marital Arts, Advanced Kanban can take mix and combine ideas and techniques from many Agile and Lean sources into an EFFECTIVE method to deliver results.