Scrumban - How to win friends and influence people?

My guess is that Ladas provokes extremes of like or dislike to his writing, depending on whether you happen to agree with him or not. Nevertheless I fall in the middle (well three and half stars rounded up perhaps!) as, while I do find the uncompromising ridicule of non-lean/less-lean processes somewhat wearing, I do think he's got some important ideas to share.

So I'm with the author on the main thrust of his argument, but just to dismiss eXtreme Programming for example as a reinterpretation of the V-model, seems less than just for one of the key advancing influences for agile in the first decade of this century. Similarly Scrum comes in for some merciless treatment - many people are going hate this book on an emotional level long before they parse the content - and especially if they interpreted the title as a description of an agile method that combines elements of Scrum and Kanban. That's not what Ladas means by Scrumban. He's discussing instead what evolution of process would take place if a team was using Scrum and adopted Kanban, while relaxing Scrum's rule-immutability. His answer is that many of Scrum's practices will change and you will end up with a much leaner process, with less work-in-progress, and independent cadences for queue replenishment, improvement events and releases. In other words you end up with a typical Kanban system. Hmmm... take care what you assume is in this book when you read the title!

Any way if you can get past his style, Ladas gives us some very interesting observations on Lean software development systems. In particular I found the "feature brigade" section fascinating - a discussion of how a Kanban process for software development could be built by analogy to a fire brigade's chain of buckets. The point about such a system is that it is self-levelling, since the point at which the fireman with an empty bucket meets the one with the full bucket is variable, depending on the current rate of working of the two participants. Such self-levelling of Kanban systems, if it can be achieved with simple feedback mechanisms like this, will lead to real advantages as they are scaled.

This is an idea worth persevering with the book for!

Lessons in Agile Management by David J. Anderson

Holiday reading this year was David Anderson's "Road to Kanban" book. I had a similar initial reaction to this book as Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw" - it's a compilation of previously published work (in this case from Anderson's blog) and if I didn't read it the first time why should I read it now?! In fact both books won me round very quickly. There's a lot of new work invested in "Lessons in Agile Management", in grouping related articles and commenting from a contemporary perspective on the developments in the agile community. There are also just valuable and insightful articles on many aspects of software development and management that I found both refreshing and original. Kanban is a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to agile frameworks - the major incumbent Scrum is consequently suspicious and negative towards it - but as this book shows, its roots are deep and arguably more secure than many views of agility. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a broader understanding of the thinking behind Kanban and the principles it's built on. You will get a more balanced view than is possible from the texts that just focus on the methods artifacts and techniques.

Could Kanban be defined in a "Scale-free" manner?

Scale-free or scale-invariant processes are like fractals. They work independently of scale - from the intergalactic to the molecular if you like. Could a scale-free definition exist for an agile process such as Kanban - a process that would be robust and effective from the personal and small team scale to the scale of whole or multiple enterprises?

The Wiener process (random or Brownian variation) is scale-invariant (from Wikipedia)

I've recently returned from three days in Hamburg on +David Anderson's Kanban masterclass and this was one of the questions that was raised during the sessions. Uncontroversially Anderson stated that Kanban, like agile processes such as Scrum, XP and FDD, is not scale-free. Different definitions of Kanban exist at different scales. Personal Kanban applies to individuals and small teams. It uses a subset of the methods and techniques defined in Anderson's Blue Book and may have other techniques which are not applicable at higher levels. Equally Portfolio Kanban, which does not yet have a reference text, but exists in the experience of enterprises applying Kanban to multiple interconnected organisations and projects, is different enough to smaller-scale flavours of Kanban to be considered different in essence, not just in scale. 

I admit to finding this discussion frustrating since I think there is at least the possibility of defining Kanban in a scale-free manner. This would not be true of Scrum for example because the "immutable" roles, artifacts, events, and rules of Scrum are specific to the single-team scale. When you scale Scrum, even to a single scrum of scrums, the rules and practice have to be different at the larger scale. If we take the Blue Book definition of Kanban it maybe suffers from exactly the same problem. But the book is too large to be the process definition. Chapter 2 of the book might be a candidate, but it is not specific enough nor contains enough detail to test compliance.

I'm looking forward to the publication of a basic Kanban definition - Anderson stated it was in the pipeline - as my own feeling is that it should aim to be scale-free, at least over these three levels. Anderson positions Kanban as a process for organisation improvement in the knowledge work space. As such the practices relate to how to visualise work and improve, rather than the specifics of organising teams or indeed software development. At least at the first level of definition - the simplest and sparsest definition - keeping it scale-free should be both possible and useful.

Postscript: A possible candidate for a scale-free process is Feynman's Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

One could argue this is a process only for a single person - I'm sure he intended it that way. But arguably it is scale-free. It's just the difficult and interesting part of the process as far as team problem solving is concerned (how do you write down the problem? how do you think together? how do you write down the solution) remains completely obscured. In the end it is only a trivial scale-free process.

Is there such a thing as a (non-trivial) scale-free agile process?