When is Kanban Appropriate?

Look at the contexts in which using Kanban is preferable.

An artificial time-boxed delivery

Thanks to the spread of Scrum, many teams have been forced by consultants and managers to adopt the framework, when clearly, their way of working would have benefited from a pull system like Kanban.

You can identify these situations just by asking team members, but there are other clear signs that Scrum is not a suitable option. We usually find the following symptoms:

  • The future is uncertain
  • Priorities are often changing
  • Replanning is common and frequent (even within the same sprint with the addition of urgent work or bug fixes)
  • High discard rate
  • High cancellation rate of already started work
  • A significant amount of delivered work is ignored or made available to customers much later than the actual delivery date

Overburdening

Over the years, we have found many different situations, but a common one, despite the size of the organization, is where teams are suffering from overburdening.

These teams are usually implementing Scrum, but their workflow is still clogged up, they are ...