Chapter 5 of the book, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, discusses “Going beyond Scrum.” This is a big chapter, so we are taking it in two parts. Last time, we talked about the importance of optimizing the whole and taking a holistic view of the team if you want to be able to impact the enterprise. Now, we turn to two more key factors: the importance of managing your workflow and the value of accessing and using the good practices that have already been learned by others.
In the book, we touched on the idea of Kanban for Software Development and it deserves some more consideration. We also cover resources and thought leaders to pay attention to as you look toward moving beyond (classic) Scrum to the enterprise.
Kanban is an approach to managing work by focusing on the flow of work. How you organize the work – using a team-based swarming approach or a work-phase approach – is left to you; what is important is that you manage the amount of “work-in-progress” (WIP) that the team has going on at any time. And the organization manages WIP intentionally, by policy. Limiting WIP helps reduce delay. Improving the process, then, is focused on reducing anything that impedes the flow of work. That is how you choose what to improve.
Kanban is appropriate even in your Scrum practice. It is truly remarkable how well it helps to have a defined workflow and process improvement approach.
The Scrum Clinic
In our years of coaching Scrum, we have learned some good practices that every team seems to have to learn. It makes sense to learn them early rather than forcing the team to have to discover them on its own (per the classic Scrum approach). Why reinvent the wheel when there is already so much more to discover.
We pulled together essential resources into one place, “The Scrum Clinic,” which you can access for free. Each resource is small “chunk of high-leverage knowledge” that will get you going in your own use of Scrum much more quickly.
Examples include:
