If your team is currently struggling in their Scrum practice, you may be ready to give up or try something else.  Kanban is becoming quite popular and I'm recently a Kanban convert so I can understand the allure especially having seen it work so fantastically for teams.  However, as a coach, it's my responsibility to find out the root cause of the team's problems with Scrum first.  Sometimes it's a simple change that can get them back on track and well worth the cost savings of another training expense.

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Kanban is a scheduling system and thanks to it you can easily monitor your team’s workflow. It tells you what should be done, when and by whom.  In software development it is a board with a number of placeholders for work to be done. You and your team create separate tasks and place them on it. When the task is completed, you just relocate it to the “done” column.

Among the main advantages of Kanban boards are their simplicity and visualization of the working process.  You and your team always know what others team’s members do just now without asking them about it.

A lot of teams use ordinary whiteboards with stickers as Kanban boards. It really works, but not in case of distributed teams, when members are located in different offices, cities or even countries. One more point against ordinary whiteboards, is that it is not convenient to use it when your team is more than 5 members, as you should have several boards to place all the tasks. Moreover, you should take a photo of the each status’s change of the tasks to analyze the team’s workflow.

Ever since I came across Agile methods some years back, I have become a die-hard fan of it. I wonder, why Agile is not been accepted as Industry standard for Software development, even after having many advantages over other methods.

The answer to this question according to me is reluctance to CHANGE. Agile requires difference kind of mind-set; it is a paradigm shift as compared to traditional managed projects. Traditional Managers do not want to change from the way they are working for years i.e. they do not want to come out of there comfort zone and explore new ways to success.

I have come across many people, who by name of ‘Short Release’ become uncomfortable with Agile. I do not have any statistics, but I think, unless Agile is enforced by Customer, there would be few people / project / company, who would advocate Agile.

-Vinayak Mehta

It turns out that Kanban isn't just applying for a job on your development team, it wants to become roomates too. I've been detecting a disturbance in the agile force coming from planet Kanban and last month's Agile Journal cover story, "What is best: Scrum or Kanban?", compared this rising trend with the Srum we know and love. And now there's personal kanban.

I came across this intriguing paradox in a David J. Anderson article about Personal Kanban.