In recent times Scrum and Kanban are compared very often. It’s basically strange, because they do not have really much in common. On the one hand Scrum is a typical development process, with its own roles definition (scrum master, product owner, etc.), milestones (end of sprints), activities (daily standups, etc.), artifacts (user stories) etc. and Kanban on the other hand which is just a method to improve and maintain a high level of your already existing process.
If you intend implement Scrum in your team, you can not keep your existing organization, you need to change a lot, you need to change your mind. If you will try to combine existing structures with Scrum the achieved improvements will be far below your expectations if any at all.
Kanban is totally different, the challenge here is to understand how your process currently looks like, in what steps your process can be split, which internal artifacts, deliveries do you have. It’s about elimination of waste of resources. Small example: it’s a small consulting and training company, there are three steps in the productivity chain: customer acquisition, performance of training and writing of invoices. If the company will acquire more customers than trainer are able to perform – it’s waste of resources and ruin of company’s name, if trainers performs more trainings than the invoices will be written – the same. Basically Kanban is much more difficult than it sounds.
I would compare Scrum with a recipe for cooking apple-pie with all ingredients, steps to do etc. And Kanban presumes you already know how bake apple-pies, it defines how to bake them just-in-time without waste of time and resources. Not really comparable – isn’t it? With other words Kanban can help you to improve your waterfall-process as well as it can help you to manage multiple teams which use Scrum.
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