Scrum or Kanban: what to choose?

How many times have you heard people quarrel over which one was better – Kanban or Scrum? Probably a lot, especially if you work in product development.

Kanban and Scrum are two very common project management processes. They help teams adhere to agile principles and get things done. Some teams prefer to use only Scrum but many have adopted certain Kanban principles.

Scrum and Kanban allow you to break down and complete complex and bulky tasks. They attach great importance to continuous improvement and process optimization and share the same interest in the highly visible workflow.

Even if they have similarities, there are actually significant differences between these two agile methodologies. Scrum for example aims for effective planning from the start of the project while Kanban focuses more on continuous improvement.

It is not always easy to choose the method that will best suit your project and your team, which is why Elitech Systems is helping you today to see more clearly!

A reminder of the principles of Scrum

Scrum is an Agile framework. It is a method based on short, iterative, and adaptive development cycles. It should be noted that communication is an essential part of the Scrum process.

To plan, organize, administer, and optimize this method, Scrum relies on three key roles: the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the development team. The Scrum process encourages members of this team to assess what is working and what is not working through meetings (called events) like the Sprints and the Daily Scrums.

Scrum teams organize themselves, advocate communication and work as equals, despite their different responsibilities. The team is united by the goal of delivering value to customers.

According to one of the last Forbes studies“49% of executives say that the success of Scrum is mainly due to the fact that it focuses on customers”. It would also gain more and more popularity in the Agile world.

A reminder of the Kanban principles

Kanban is a subcategory of Agile frameworks. It is a visual system that allows you to manage development work. This method promotes continuous improvement, productivity, and project efficiency.

Like Scrum, Kanban teams are committed to reducing the time it takes to complete a project (or user story) from start to finish. They do this by using a kanban board and continuously improving their workflow. Kanban is ideal for teams that have a lot of incoming requests whose priority and size vary.

The entire team owns the Kanban board. Some teams recruit an agile coach to help them, but unlike Scrum, there is no such thing as a “master kanban” capable of making sure everything goes well. It is the collective responsibility of the entire team to collaborate and complete the tasks on the board.

Which one to choose for your project?

There is really no way to answer this question. Scrum and Kanban are powerful tools that can significantly improve your project management. The best option is to familiarize yourself with both and experience various aspects of both in your production environment.

But if we were, to sum up Scrum is the most complex, strictest, and most difficult methodology to adopt. Scrum sprints (iterations of 1 to 4 weeks) are at the heart of the strategy. They set clear goals and deadlines, give total control to the project manager, and are ideal for large and rapidly evolving projects. Scrum requires an experienced team that organizes many meetings which can take a little time. The Scrum framework is ideal for companies or experienced teams working on a product or in particular a project lasting more than a year.

Kanban is the simplest and easiest method to adopt. It visualizes work and the work process on a Kanban board, which ensures that all team members are on the same page and reveals bottlenecks in the workflow while remaining flexible in production. However, Kanban is less efficient in situations of shared resources, inflexible to manage several products or large projects and it is difficult to follow the individual contribution of the team. In addition, an outdated Kanban card can cause problems.

Creating a hybrid of the two is perfectly acceptable if it works best for you. This is the Scrumban, a combination of [Scrum + (Kan) ban]. This methodology was originally developed to facilitate the transition of existing Scrum teams to Kanban who wish to explore Lean methodologies. Scrumban combines the structure of Scrum with Kanban’s flow-based and visualization methods. It allows teams to have the agility of Scrum and the simplicity of Kanban while not requiring any role updates and being easy to adopt.

Do not try to find out which is the best! Find out which one will answer your problems the most.