Combining Kanban and Scrum – lessons from a team of sysadmins

Katarzyna Terlecka

Agile Conference (AGILE), 2012

Student: 劉家豪Student ID:102522087

Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

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Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

3

Introduction

• A team of fantastically intelligent system administrators.

• The team consisted of :• Two Windows guys were taking care of one sub-network.

• Three Linux admins with their own network and source control systems.

• One group knew nothing about others!

• They have had responsibilities and access to different parts of the network and those due to security policies could not be shared. 4

Introduction

• Those five guys had around 1700 users distributed across 3 locations and 1000 square meters of a telecommunications laboratory space to take care of.

• They were administering close to 100 various servers, spread across 4 server rooms in two locations in the city.

• Because of that the amount of ad-hoc work they’ve had usually exceeded 50 % of their time.

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Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

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First Try – Scrum

• They was asked to introduce Scrum to the team for improving the work management.

• They struggled for five weekly sprints, but failed miserably at each event.

• Because of the granularity of tasks and the change, the sprint planning meeting does not make sense at all.

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Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

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Second Try – Kanban

• The idea of Kanban, which was use to manage work flow.

• After five days everything crumbled again.

• They needed that impaired but still beneficial planning, measurements, the care of the Product Owner, someone to guard the process and take care of them, estimations and progress projections and before all, the feeling and view of progress.

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Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

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The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• There was a Definition of Done for few types of tasks, that had to be followed.

• There was a Product Backlog - an ordered list of things to do. Format is up to the Product Owner.

• There was also a physical Board.• Queues

• Competency groups

• Done & rejected11

The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

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The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Quotas - recommended limit of tasks N of m members• m + 1 <= N <= 2m + 2

• Roles - There was a Product Owner, who was taking care of the Product Backlog, and producing tasks for the board.

• Event – Grooming Session (weekly), Retrospective (2 weeks), Review (max 2 weeks), Daily planning (0.5hr)

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Outline

• Introduction

• First Try – Scrum

• Second Try – Kanban

• The Scrum and Kanban Hybrid

• Lessons from the way

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Lessons from the way

• Product Owner - the team decided to direct all requests to him, so that they can work undisturbed.

• Planning – everyday planning like a sprint.

• Firefighting - they decided to set up a firefighter, who will take care of a designated mailbox with all of the tiny requests. If there was a bigger thing, the firefighter forwarded the message to the PO.

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Lessons from the way

• Continuous Improvement - all improvements were stored at the bottom of the Product Backlog, and once in a while they were reviewed and pulled up.

• The feeling of progress – One of the biggest problems in Kanban was that the team did not feel the progress. In the hybrid, from time to time we assembled to review finished elements on the board.

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Q & A

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