There's Always Room for Kanban

Scrum has emerged as the most popular framework for organizing software teams. But even in organizations that mandate Scrum at the team level, Kanban still offers a way to visualize work across the wider enterprise.

At the enterprise level, team-level Agile is just one small part of how work happens. Kanban gives organizations a way to see how work flows across teams and value streams so they can understand and manage the whole system. It also helps organizations manage work outside the scope of Scrum that has no visibility or process, including things like change management, event planning, and discovery for new major strategic initiatives.

Kanban Creates a Map of How Work Moves

Kanban creates a map and helps people see what’s happening in their organization, often for the very first time. It maps the work an organization is already doing: the requests, backlogs, handoffs, dependencies, and queues that make up its workflows and value streams.

Most Agile implementations focus on team-level process and tooling: backlogs, boards, sprints, and user stories. Outside the team, there are usually no comparable systems or structures that guide how the rest of the organization operates. Kanban is one of the few tools managers have to visualize organizational workflows.

Every system has a bottleneck, so there is always something to manage, but when agile is treated only as a team-level practice, bottlenecks often fall outside teams’ scope, leaving people with no visibility into those problems and no way to act on them. By capturing all stages of a value stream, Kanban systems create opportunities to identify those bottlenecks and enable managers to address them.

Kanban’s real strength is providing what most organizations lack: a system-level view of how work moves through the organization. It isn’t a system focused only on team-level delivery, and it doesn’t dictate how work should flow or how teams and services should work. At its most basic, it’s a way to see what’s already happening.

A lot of work also happens on the side: interviews, onboarding, training, continuous improvement, events, workshops, and special initiatives. These types of work are never tracked, yet they take time from the people doing it. Kanban is a natural way for people to collaborate and manage many kinds of unique, non-standard work.

Kanban is something you do to your existing process.

— David Anderson, “Adoption of Lean/Kanban Principles – Part 1”(opens in a new tab)open_in_new

Kanban Helps Manage Work Before Commitment and After Delivery

Even for teams using Scrum, introducing Kanban can make the flows before commitment and after sprint completion visible and give the people responsible a way to manage them.

• Before commitment:
  • Level the flow of new work so teams are not overburdened with demand.
  • Shape work before it reaches planning so teams commit to items that are ready.
  • Create a shared backlog and scheduled work across teams so it only starts when the right conditions are in place.
  • Create a workflow that captures how ideas are evaluated so must-have items are separated from weak ones.
• After the sprint:
  • Make the delays between “sprint done” and “released to production” visible so finished work reaches customers faster.
  • Follow work even further than “released to production” to validate that customers are actually using it.

Discovery Kanban systems, also called upstream Kanban, capture where a team’s work comes from and all the analysis, shaping, prioritization, and trade-off decisions that happen on new ideas before a team starts working on them.

Later, when work is completed at the end of a sprint and the team shifts focus to the next sprint, that work continues in another workflow before it reaches the customer. A downstream Kanban makes this often invisible post-sprint work visible: integration, regression, operational readiness, releases, and go/no-go decisions. Integration and release owners can see what is waiting and what is coming, and coordinate with the right teams when work is ready to start the release process.

The enemy of flow is the invisible and unmeasured queues that undermine all aspects of product development performance.

— Don Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow

Kanban Gives Visibility To Work Across the Enterprise

Kanban coaches are trained to see work as services, a network of workflows through which an organization serves internal and external customers. Software development teams make up just a small portion of the larger network of services, and those services depend on one another.

Three helpful perspectives to consider when looking at that network are width, depth and height: width along the value stream, depth through the teams and services each flow depends on, and height from team backlogs up to strategic priorities.

Width Follows the Value Stream From Concept to Cash

The discovery flow before a team’s commitment point and release flows after a team’s “sprint done” are two important parts of the end-to-end value stream.

Depth Follows Dependencies

It includes the teams and shared services a delivery team relies on. Dependencies on other teams or services like enterprise architecture, platform, security, data, and environments reveal the full value chain of services and support that development teams depend on.

Height Zooms Out From Team Backlogs to Coordination and Strategy

A Kanban board can coordinate the work of a single team, but it can also coordinate multiple teams in delivering products and services. Multi-team boards make dependencies and priorities visible across the value stream.

A cross-team Kanban view gives the people doing and coordinating the work a shared place to see where an initiative is, what is waiting, and where a decision or conversation is needed.

Kanban has really always been about value streams and end-to-end service delivery. It’s about coordinating multiple teams and multiple departments.
— David Anderson, David Anderson on Kanban Flight Levels(opens in a new tab)open_in_new

An even higher view of work can connect strategic objectives and key results to the initiatives teams are delivering in their day-to-day work. The organization can see how team-level work contributes to those priorities, while also tracking progress and measuring impact. This view focuses on strategic themes and outcomes, rather than a larger board of aggregated team-level tasks.

Map the Work Already Happening

Kanban gives organizations a map of the work they’re already doing. A map changes how people understand their work: where it is, how it moves, and where it comes from. By mapping the whole system, people can talk about work in ways that weren’t possible before.

Discovery systems and operational portfolio boards map work and workflows, not teams. Building a map of the system can be a non-intrusive way to improve alignment and shared understanding without interfering with your current teams or how they work.

Agile is often treated as a team-level approach to software delivery, with the rest of the business under a different set of rules. Applying Kanban across the organization helps move people towards a shared way of thinking and working. The views these systems create help managers coordinate delivery, expose dependencies and bottlenecks, connect daily work with strategic priorities, and balance commitments with capacity.