As an active member of the agile community I am frequently asked questions about what is the right thing to do in a given circumstance. Such as:
- Should we use Scrum or Kanban?
- Is a one-week or two-week sprint better?
- Does every product backlog item have to be in a user story format?
- What is the best way to handle standups, when not everyone is available at the same time due to time zones?
In typical consultant fashion, the answer to these questions is: “it depends”. And what it depends on is the answer to additional questions. As a consultant, I’m more than happy to engage with your organization to ask the right questions. But as an agilist, I’d like to share a simple approach I have with the community, and help as many people be successful as possible. The approach is:
- What are our constraints?
- This is the first question as often times you can rule out an option as simply not practical in the current situation.
- What are our goals?
- Before deciding which of the remaining options that are available it is important to be clear on what group is attempting to achieve. Agile is a team sport, and answering these goals must be shared by the team or group. If the team can’t align on goals, than there are more important things for the team to focus on than which option is better.
- How does each of the options help us reach our goals?
- Of the available options how does each one help team achieve the agreed upon goals? While there will certainly be disagreements here, framing the discussion in terms of meeting defined goals will lead to a more effective and efficient conversation.
- Do any of the options have negative impacts?
- Outside of our core goals are there negative impacts that need to be considered?
Let’s apply this model to each of the 4 questions. We’ll cover the first question below, and the other 3 in future posts for brevity sake.
Should we use Scrum or Kan ban?
- What are the constraints?
- Do we have stable team members and predictable work? Scrum relies heavily on rhythm, cadence, and predictability. If you are on a service team where new top priority issues can come in at any minute, Scrum would be a difficult fit. Similarly, if your teams availability is unpredictable because they have other obligations that can’t be reasonably predicted over the course of an iteration, Scrum might be a difficult fit.
- Do we have organizational constraints? If the organization requires reporting based on sprints and a retro, then flow based approaches such as Kan ban more difficult. If people in the organization are knowledgeable on Scrum and not Kan ban there will be challenges integrating a new approach including education within the team and across all the groups you need to work with.
- What are our goals?
- Are we focused on completing our work?
- Are we focused on delivering the project? (Hint, this is better than just completing work)
- Are we concerned with the entire organization’s delivery? (Hint, this is the idea)
- Are we worried about passing an internal IT audit?
- Are we worried about upsetting certain leaders?
- Do we want to be seen as cutting edge in the community?
- How doe each of the options help us reach our goals? In this case let’s say we decided on ensuring entire organization delivery and passing an audit as our highest priority. I suggest 2-4 goals, but your mileage may vary.
- organizational delivery: Would using Scrum or Kan ban affect other projects ability to deliver? Perhaps coordination and collaboration with other teams would be easier with one or the other. How would Infra teams be affected, and could they plan effectively with one Scrum or Kan ban? How would release management be able to plan and support releases with each option.
- Passing an internal audit? If you work for a large IT organization they likely have standards, and will often review your work to see if it meets the organizational standard. If you choose Kan ban or Scrum will you meet those standards? If not, can you collaborate with the audit team in advance to get an exception for your approach. Asking for forgiveness is not always the best approach.
- Do any of the options have negative impacts? Outside of your major goals discussed above, are there any negative impacts to one option over another?
- Will using Scrum upset a leader in the organization?
- Will using Kan ban require a purchase of new tools?
- Will introducing a new approach into the organization add confusion and create more problems than it solves?
Once you can answer the above 4 questions, answering the initial question becomes a lot easier. Your decisions and direction should always be dependent on your goals and constraints. One should never blindly follow a model, including this one.
- What are our constraints?.
- What are our goals?
- How does each of the options help us reach our goals?
- Do any of the options have negative impacts?
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