Written by Alex Gray

When I am training Scrum courses, I often like to ask attendees: ‘Is anyone using Kanban’? More often than not, a number of people on the course will say ‘Yes we have Kanban boards’. So I say: ‘Great! Have you mapped your workflow on your board, and are you applying WIP (Work In Progress) limits?’ To which the answer repeatedly is ‘No, we just use a Kanban board’.

What follows next is that I am asked to explain the difference between Scrum and Kanban. Which is when I normally get the question: ‘Should we use Scrum orKanban?’

Let’s look at some of the possible deciding factors.

I’ve been carrying this bit of paper around in my bag for about six months. It’s a scribble I drew once while on one of ‘those’ conference calls. You know - the one where someone is talking and you are not entirely sure why you are dialled in, let alone why you are attempting to listen.

At the time I was trying to work out a simple way of showing different Agile adoption approaches and how they can so easily go awry.

So what in the world does this scribble show?