Co-author Maritza van den Heuvel co-author of Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement, a publication of Modus Cooperandi discussed Scrum and Corey Ladas’s contributions to Kanban.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Tales of Continuous Improvement
Joe: You’re still working in a Scrum discipline, I think. Is there still merit in that process or in using both?
Maritza: Very certainly. I think, again, back to the point of no one size fits all, I think what you will see in the book as well that many of the stories reflect an approach where a team is evolving from Scrum to Kanban or sometimes using both at the same time. Each of the approaches has their merits. I personally have a specific tendency and preference towards Kanban for ongoing work, for work that is not easily time boxed and where a time box could create its own share of problems because it is an artificial boundary in many cases of how work is delivered to the customer. I think for me they don’t exclude each other. You can easily use Kanban and apply concepts and roles from Scrum in your environment. You can even have an organization-wide enterprise level Kanban with specific teams running Scrum because they’re working on specifically defined projects. I think it is about which one of those works best for you with Lean and Kanban potentially as an organizational wrapper that gives you the visibility and the workflow clarity that you need.
Joe: I thought in the introduction that a lot of credit was given to Corey Ladas, who I always think is the forgotten person in Kanban. He seemed like he was the one that provided the Agile, Scrum Bridge over to Kanban in his book Scrumban. Is that book still worthwhile reading?
Maritza: I think Corey Ladas’s Scrumban is certainly a seminal work that you should read if you are at all involved in using Scrum or Kanban. For a while we used Scrumban to, as the working title for this book, however, as it evolved we came to the conclusion that Scrumban in particular as a term, possibly become contaminated somewhat in the industry because people had interpreted it to mean a conflation, a hybrid of Scrum and Kanban and actually it was never intended that way. It was more about showing a migration, an evolution from Scrum to Kanban and how the one naturally could lead to the other, and I think we lent heavily on the principles that Corey wrote about.
Many of the principles that we write about in the book regarding encouraging craftsmanship, encouraging ownership of the work process, implementing visibility and a clear value chain approach to mapping your work. All of those concepts and principles are derived from Scrumban as written by Corey Ladas.
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