Right now a lot is being said about Kanban, and this agile approach seems to be gaining momentum. I’m delighted by this and not surprised: many things imposed by Scrum (and XP) that slow down companies in their adoption are not present in Kanban, for example: the redistribution of roles, or the recomposition of teams. Kanban’s main strength is to allow modeling of the flow on the existing setup, then evolving it forward. I no longer remember whose words these are (maybe Mike Cohn) but when Scrum operates a revolution, Kanban proposes an evolution. One will then easily understand that many entities are more tempted by Kanban than by Scrum. And so Kanban could probably much more than Scrum be the Trojan horse for agile methods in companies.

But

Because there is -in my opinion- a “but”.

It is much easier to not be agile while doing Kanban, than while doing Scrum.

It will therefore be much easier for certain companies to falsely seize the agile concept through Kanban than through Scrum.

In many cases a revolution is much more preferable than an evolution.

At this time when the success of agile methods seems at its peak, and therefore where the risk of perversion (to quote Alistair Cockburn) is very strong, Kanban could ultimately rather transform into a Trojan horse for agile methods without their knowledge…

One could respond to me: “what matters is that it works or that it is agile?”, naturally that it works. But what does “work”, “succeed”, “result” mean (ooh the remnants of a discussion in a car yesterday). If we agree on that, I suppose I would add by saying that it will however work better if it’s agile.

I naturally don’t have to this day the experience of for example Laurent Morisseau on Kanban (and I therefore recommend reading him). But, -personally- I see great qualities in it: centralizing/modeling and prioritizing in a single point all the activity. Like Scrum’s backlog, except that Scrum’s backlog doesn’t contain everything, or very rarely. With Kanban all trade-offs are made in the same place, without escape. On the other hand since we work at the level of, let’s say, the “story”, we have greater flexibility (in change) than in the iteration.

But I also note shortcomings: in my experience (and I’m therefore also taking a precaution here), the collaborative aspects of teams are too faded (I know we can remedy this: but as mentioned above, it’s not an obligation…), the presence of a deadline (of iterations) fades away, interactions are less necessary. Overall if I feel more comfortable with Scrum it’s because it proposes a strong human connotation, of human relationship, of dynamics, whereas Kanban is clearly rather an intellectual pleasure of modeling (hence also its seduction).

I discussed this subject a bit yesterday at that agile lunch I had the pleasure of attending, and ultimately I believe it was Thierry (Cros @thierrycros) who had the final word and I hope not to betray his thought: yes Kanban but don’t start with it, grasp it when the team is already mature.