Mattias Skarin author of the book, Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both put it this way…
Joe: If that prioritization is changing all the time, it seems more like an iteration, and it’s hard to get an iteration within Kanban because Kanban seems to be a linear process. Can you elaborate on that thinking for me and how that works together?
Mattias: Even inside an iteration there are definitely linear steps; there are steps that you take to make sure the iteration is complete. This is just the same if you would think of Scrum or Development as if you use Kanban; there typically are the steps that guarantee you get a high-quality output. I’d like to say that there are more ways to deal with uncertainty; iteration is not the only way. If you have a very uncertain situation, for example, you might not know what solution that will work or what type of marketing message that the customer will buy into. Another way to approach it is to do set base design, so you run a multiple set of experiments in parallel. Then you evaluate really quickly which one of these works and you continue on with the ones that actually did work. This set base design is an underused mechanism in our organizations whereas we are getting pretty familiar with using iterations, but set base design can be as quick, or even more effective if deployed correctly.
Joe: It’s like taking a PDCA cycle and doing Plan-Do-Check-Act but when we look at Plan, Do, Check, Act that’s basically a linear progression but when we step back at it, it’s an iteration.
Mattias: Correct, I mean now you could see iteration as a way to evaluate 10 parallel experiments and then say okay, so we did 10 experiments, which one of these worked. So each experiment would be a PDCA per se but you would have a PDCA on all the 10 experiments. Running them in parallel actually buys you time because if you didn’t run them in parallel, you would have to run one after the other, and the question becomes which way is the fastest way to discover, or roll through this uncertainty.
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