Scrum and Kanban lead to the evolution of Scrumban. It combines the best of both worlds and shares several similarities with Scrum while borrowing cultural nuances from Kanban. It is a hybrid environment which is used for agile product lines with frequent interruptions. Scrumban uses fixed-size pieces of work for development and tracks work that is in queue, ready to be processed, and in process.

Scrum and Kanban both are winners when it comes to continuous process improvement and self-organizing teams. The big question is, “Can the combination work?” If it does, what are its benefits?

Benefits of Using Scrumban

1.Srcumban lets you enjoy the best of Scrum methodology while eliminating its weaknesses using Kanban methods and tools.

Scrumban doesn’t limit Work in Progress (WIP) by time. Instead, it limits WIP for each stage. This resolves the team composition issues and makes swarming natural. Swarming in agile is the act of coming together and getting a task done quickly and efficiently. Teams can bring on board stories of varying sizes. They do not have to adjust sprint boundaries if there is an unplanned change in the team composition, say someone falls sick and takes 2 days off during the sprint. In Scrum, you usually have a story followed by a list of sub-tasks that define the scope of work. When using Scrumban, a story progresses through various stages or work. There is clarity in each stage regarding which stories the team is working on and who is working on which aspect of the story. Scrumban aims at maintaining a continuous flow of work. This means once you’ve pushed a story into various phases, the remaining work is completed using the pull approach. Thanks to continuous improvement in the Scrumban environment, there aren’t anymore monotonous retrospectives. Instead, the team members get a chance to voice their concerns about impediments. Continuous improvement means issues raised by the team can be brainstormed and resolved soon after. In scrumban you can visualize the steps in your workflow. This makes it easy to identify areas of improvement and eliminate the not-so-useful steps. The project progress is easier to explain to the stakeholders and others in the organization, as you can map your workflow and process. Scrumban saves time by using the planning on demand technique. Instead of having daily meetings or spending hours on task estimations, Scrumban teams plan only when the need arises. This gives them additional time to invest in project development. The time thus saved is invested in quality control and product development. Scrumban increases waste minimization efficiency. Using flow diagrams and in-process buffers, Scrumban highlights the weaknesses and opportunities of the process. This way the team can eliminate anything which is not a value add for the customer. In Scrumban environment, the level of productivity is defined using Lead Time and Cycle Time. Cycle time is the timeframe between starting work on a story to completing it. Lead time is the total time for which a story sits on Scrumban board. There are different backlogs for product release, iterations and production issues. This ensures that the team is focused. Thus there’s an optimal utilisation of resources.

Since Scrumban utilizes the pull system to address technical tasks and other priority tasks, team foundation is strengthened and team building process is accelerated.

You have a cross-functional team, with specialist resources on board. This means you can harmonise the best of both worlds.

Teams using Scrumban can take up tasks that need immediate attention and take decisions just-in-time. Plus, the implementation of these decisions is faster. Besides, impromptu customer requests can be dealt with a sense of urgency. You can set up retrospective meetings as and when required. As a result you can work on process improvements and share lessons learned with the team. By having daily scrum meetings, you can reduce the idle time for the team and work continuously on the requirements. No need to set rigid estimations in Scrumban, especially during initiation. Instead, you can put them up dynamically depending on the outputs of daily scrum.

These benefits of using Scrum and Kanban hybrid were compiled after reviewing inputs from various experts.

Scrumban has originated to find the best solution to increase output and decrease waste while providing better visibility and higher overall success. Other methodologies also strive towards the same goal but the success of a methodology lays within the people, culture and implementation.

Have you used Scrumban or know someone who has? Share your experiences below.

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