Scrum with Kanban
Walking the Board on Daily Scrum
Scrum and Kanban can live happily ever after.
To me, the Daily Scrum along with a Sprint Goal are fundamental Scrum practices. The Daily happens every single day of the Sprint. So we better make it worth our while.
Disclaimer: Scrum and Kanban don’t have to be enemies or frenemies. We don’t have to think about a “Scrum vs Kanban”. It’s time to move on and accept a “Scrum with Kanban” approach. The Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams explains how to do it. I like to enrich the Scrum framework with Kanban principles and practices to help teams optimize the flow of work. Let’s see some practical examples.
Today I would like to focus on one aspect only: how to do the Daily Scrum with Kanban philosophy? A practice that is called “Walking the board” or “Walking the wall” illustrates this mindset. And adds a lot of value to the daily meetings.
Manage the work, let people self-organize around it
Have you ever heard about Essential Kanban Condensed? This little book available online explains the Kanban Method philosophy and principles. One of them says:
“Manage the work, let people self-organize around it.”
Let’s take a look at the traditional Daily. Everyone gives an update. Moreover, team members who want to make a good impression, often mention everything they did, all meetings included. This kind of update is of little value for other team members. Not to mention for the Sprint Goal.
The Daily Anti-patterns
Daily serves to plan the day towards reaching the Sprint Goal and not to hear a status update of each team member. On top of it, if you look at the board you will see some items that haven’t been mentioned at all, in spite of being in progress. What happens here? Are we managing the people instead of the work?
Actively manage work items in progress
The activity of walking the board helps us shift the attention from the people to the work we want to deliver. “Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams” talks about active management of work in progress. And when you think about it from a business value point of view it makes a lot of sense.
An important concept in investing is the net present value. It means that money now is more valuable than money later on.. Why? Because you can use the money to make more money! Thus, finishing something today provides more value for the end-users than finishing something tomorrow or at the end of the Sprint. And what do the Scrum Teams do for a living? Provide value to the customer and the company, right?
So how can we ensure we provide value sooner than later? Guess what, there is a Kanban principle for that too:
“Stop starting start finishing.”
Let’s start finishing user stories during the Sprint and not wait until the end of it, so the PO can close them during the Sprint Review. I saw that happening in some teams and it is an anti-pattern. When you finish something, close it. And before starting anything new, first, check with the team if you can help to finish something else.
How does “Walk the Board” work?
It helps us shift the focus from the people to the work we want to get done. Start your Daily by reviewing work in progress on your Scrum Board. Work in progress (WIP) is any work that has been started and hasn’t been done. Start from what is the closest to getting done and walk the board towards what’s just been started. Go from right to left. This way you focus on finishing something every day. You can even ask the question at the beginning:
“What can we finish today?”
And let the team self-organize to get it done. Once the team has a plan to deliver something today, move on, and address the rest of the items in progress. Check what’s going on in each of them. If they are being worked on or stay forgotten in one of the states. In case there are any blocked issues, try to unblock them.
How do we handle impediments?
All issues that have been started and got blocked at some point, are issues in progress. I’ve seen many workarounds with teams creating a “blocked” column. Is “blocked” a state in your workflow? Do all items pass through it at the same stage? What if there are two issues blocked? One got blocked during the development and another one in “Ready for QA” state due to problems with deployment to the testing environment. Evidently, to unblock an issue it will be helpful to know its current state. So don’t move it, flag it in the current state.
Rotate the facilitator
Rotate the role of the facilitator of the Daily Scrum. It has so many advantages! Everyone gets to understand what’s going on for the whole team. And the Development Team becomes the real owner of the Daily.
What we do in some teams is to rotate the facilitation on a weekly basis. Of course, it can also be done daily or per Sprint, whatever works for your team. For us, rotation on a weekly-basis helped decrease the complexity of looking for the next facilitator each day. The current facilitator nominates the next one on a Friday provided the person doesn’t have vacations during the upcoming week. Doing it for five days also helps the facilitator to get a better understanding of the progress towards the Sprint Goal. It fosters collaboration and increases the visibility of issues blocked for many days. You can give the facilitator an attractive name. Some examples I’ve come across are Batman, Board Manager, or Daily Conductor.
How do we track the progress towards Sprint Goal?
A Product Owner came to me once with a problem with the visibility of the progress towards the Sprint Goal in this setup. It is true that the items in the Sprint should be ordered by their priority which means the team should not be working on something that is low on the to-do list. But things happen. What’s more, sometimes we lose track of the progress towards the Sprint Goal if we only look at what is “In Progress” and not what is still in “To Do”.
Various solutions
In one team, we start the Daily with two questions before moving on to the rest of the items “In Progress”:
- What can we finish today?
- How are we going towards meeting the Sprint Goal?
In another team, we created swimlanes on the board according to the priority of the items and their time of resolution (Service Level Expectation: SLE).
Swimlanes here are horizontal lines on the Scrum Board separating different kinds of work items. The top swimlane was called “Expedite” and showed up only if we had a “fire” — a blocking issue on production that required immediate attention and less than 24h resolution.
The second one grouped all the items the Sprint Goal was made up of. Depending on the product and company set up those items will amount to a different percentage of the Sprint Backlog. And that’s OK. From my experience, the important thing is to have a north star — a Sprint Goal — that we want to accomplish as a team. As it will guide the Development Team in priority definition. And achieving it will make them feel good about themselves. The dopamine effect I mentioned in the Sprint Planning video.
The third swimlane displayed all the rest of the items planned for the Sprint and as such the team did their best to deliver them.
This way the team can visually distinguish which items belong to which category and understand their priority.
Find your way
There are different ways to conduct a Daily Scrum. And that’s good because there are different teams out there with different needs. Scrum Guide says:
The structure of the meeting is set by the Development Team and can be conducted in different ways if it focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal.
I recommend “Walking the Board” if the team clearly struggles with the classical “three questions”. If the dailies take forever and the team members stop paying attention to one another waiting for their turn only. Experiment, evaluate, and decide if you want to keep it, or keep iterating until you find your best fit.
