
Some Day Kanban Will Fail 75% of the Time - nreece
http://www.noop.nl/2010/03/some-day-kanban-will-fail-75-of-the-time.html
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wallflower
We have been using Kanban for about a month now. It is very successful. Scrum
focuses on people. Kanban focuses on the tasks.

It is safe to say that everyone on the project from testers to developers to
higher management that is not actively involved has a good sense of the entire
state of the project.

Scrum is too micro-management - daily updates - what I did today, what I'm
doing tomorrow - you'll laugh but one of my co-workers - he told his wife, a
teacher, about scrum and the burn downs. And she laughed and brought over a
sample of the 'What I'll do today/What I did yesterday' template that her
school uses with 3rd graders to track their progress.

Kanban is not a silver bullet. It really helps to have a large physical board
- a virtual board - be it a shared Excel spreadsheet that is version
controlled - is not very graspable - even if it is the defacto authoritative
source.

Kanban works because people here want it to work. Because they're tired of
scrum. Of being micro-managed. Of having to sit through endless scrum burndown
calls where everyone has to talk about what they did. Especially when the team
is overseas and they are dialing in late. Kanban cuts that down to what is
needed to be known. If you need to have longer discussions, you break off from
the main talk. Kanban calls are JIT updates, not updates just for updates.

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DanielBMarkham
Disclaimer: I teach this stuff

I don't make a big distinction in scrum, Kanban, Agile, agile, Crystal, etc.

If the burndowns were buggin' you, stop the burndowns. If the daily standups
seemed pedantic, stop them (or better yet, fix them). If your team is too
large, Kanban might give you a better sense of control but development's big
obstacle is communication, not control.

I think Kanban boards are great. If it tickles your fancy, go for it.

But it's no more a silver bullet than scrum was. At the end of the day, teams
that regularly adapt beat teams that jump from one big thing to another, apply
it rigidly, then wait too long to jump to the next big thing. The idea is
continuously tweaking what you're doing, not latching on to a marketing term.

Hope that didn't tick you off :)

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AlecM
Do you consult companies in implementing these practices? What was the largest
team using Scrum that you felt was still effective? At my job, there's 30
people at the daily stand-up and it just seems out of control, especially as
we pass a speaking stick across the group. What is this, Lord of the Flies?

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DanielBMarkham
Yes. I'm a startup junkie and coder who ended up consulting companies in
implementing these practices because once your development group starts
growing, performance usually tanks. Big companies are looking at the stats and
seeing that in some cases they are spending 10 times the cost and taking 4
times as long to develop similar software to what a small company can put out.
So there's a big pain out there.

Avoid large teams! The daily stand-up should be 5, maybe 10 minutes, and
should move along very quickly. A 30-person team, especially if the PM is
playing scrum master and doing Q&A during the stand-ups, can be the worst kind
of death march.

I've watched/participated in about 60 teams, and consulted with other coaches
on probably 300 or so. Yes, there are 30-person teams that do well, but it's
very rare, and usually there are other things that made them do well.

Organizations consistently over-staff teams, especially those in trouble. It's
depressing to watch, because it just makes matters a thousand times worse for
everybody involved.

Here's a corny tip that I found actually makes standups a little more
bearable: Forget the speaking stick. Use a nerf ball, and forbid hand-offs.
Everybody stands and nobody knows who's getting the ball next until the guy
throws it. Also you have about 30 seconds to do your standup and then you're
done, one way or the other. Standups should always add energy to the team and
help with the day's agenda. If it's "Lord of the Flies" you guys are really
out-of-whack somewhere.

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AlecM
Well, I was being figurative there, we actually do use a nerfball but I'm
pretty sure it's universally despised. What usually happens is someone is done
speaking, holds the ball up and looks around for a taker. No one ever really
says, "Me next!" so it's thrown to a random person. At least one or two people
will drop it per stand-up and someone else will always go, "Nice one,
butterfingers!" and there's the awkward, uncomfortable laugh.

I observed this practice for a couple weeks and came to an average of 2.8
seconds per ball movement. Times that by 29 (amount of passes) and you get
81.2 seconds per day we spend tossing that ball around. At an average salary
of about $65K amongst the group, the company spends $42.29 per day on passing
a ball around; that's just under a $11,000 a year!

But I digress...

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DanielBMarkham
Got a better one for you. Start doing the math on how much money you waste
thinking you're smart and understand everything and then blow it later on
because you missed a key conversation. I'll stack that up against nerf-ball-
tossing any day of the week. Or how about useless status reports? (stand-ups
are not status reports). Or meetings with required attendance that accomplish
nothing?

Communication kills teams. That's why the 30-person team sucks --
communication difficulties expand at an exponential rate. Stand-ups, pair-
programming, co-location,and all the rest of that are just feeble attempts to
address this problem. If you don't like one of these things, stop it. But that
doesn't make the underlying problem go away. Whatever you do, you have to
constantly be figuring out ways to solve this problem, not just thinking
you've got it nailed because you're doing X.

Agile is very simple. But if you try hard enough, and most teams do, you can
screw it up.

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swombat
Very good, if somewhat obvious, point: Ultimately, practices can only help you
if you've got the brains to apply them correctly.

There is no substitute for a quality team. No amount of structure can make up
for idiots.

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Tichy
How about creating a system that works with normal people, rather than robots?
My feeling is that if it is so difficult to implement the system that almost
nobody gets it right, it might be the mistake of the system. It should come
more naturally, not forced.

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bmickler
Wow. The word "kanban" in the title caught my attention so I thought I'd take
a look. I currently work (for another week anyway) on the finance team for an
aerospace manufacturing firm so we are very familiar with kanban and other
lean principles. Little did I know lean principles (even Kanban?) are working
their way into the software development world!

This is all the more interesting since I've just taken a position as the
financial operations manager for a web/finance startup in Atlanta. Good to
know that some of the cool lean principles and tools can translate into my new
environment! Definitely something to look into...

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AlecM
Management at my gig decided to just use both, a ScrumBan if you will. I think
the general manager just wanted a board to stop and look at every time he had
to go to the bathroom.

