Contrasting the Daily Scrum with Kanban’s Daily Standup
In the Scrum Guide, the Daily Scrum suggests using these three questions:
- What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
- What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
- Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?
You’ll notice the focus is on the individual. In a Kanban standup, the questions would be different;
- What did we do yesterday?
- What will we do today?
- What challenges are we having?
With a good Kanban board the first two questions will take very little time. Now the difference between “I” and “we” may not seem to be that much, but it actually is. Here’s why.
Focusing on the individual is not Lean. The biggest difference between Scrum and Kanban is that Scrum is based on empirical process control and Kanban is based on systems-thinking. Systems-thinking suggests that most of the challenges are due to the system and not the individual. Hence a focus on the individual’s progress or problems doesn’t’ make much sense. It also suggests having explicit workflow so that people can have a common frame of reference. This enables the Deming Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle with the team building a better understanding of their work. This is the second biggest difference between Scrum and Kanban – Kanban suggests full visibility of the workflow while Scrum has every story have it’s own delineated with tasks – again highlighting that there is not an overall systems view.
Another advantage of talking about “we” is that the team can run experiments and no one is wrong – it’s a “we” thing. We can run experiments and learn together.
We don’t want to put people on the spot. In many companies adopting Scrum the teams are not well-gelled. People don’t really like talking about their challenges. Talking about their blockages feels like there is something wrong with them. I’m not saying that there is something wrong with them, but it feels that way. Again, it’s a team, not an individual having a problem.
We are trying to collaborate and therefore should work as a team. By having explicit workflows, people on the team know what individuals are doing. You therefore don’t need to discuss what individuals are doing. A good Kanban board will tell you that. The time of the daily standup can therefore be spent on solving the problems of the team.
The Bottom Line
While “I” or “we” may look insignificant, it is a significant indicator of the mindset. The systems-thinking basis of Kanban means we look at our system and see how to improve it. We have an agreed upon workflow and agreements that we explicitly state. It’s all of us in it together – not a collection of individuals working together. This is a significant difference.
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Enterprise Transformation Leader
6 年I have been coaching teams to use Kanban board for daily scrum, as that not only promotes the team ownership, it reduces the repeat of the same story being talked multiple times by different members resulting in the overhead to piece together to truly understand the latest state of that story. Also since the conversation is driven by the story cards, product owner will be able to relate well and has more engagement. Team once trained, will now talks about what's needed to move card to the finish line, instead of just task progress. Also this promotes STOP starting START finishing....
Microsoft Power plaform practice Lead at Cognizant, SPC, RTE, POPM, APM, LPM, ML/AI Certified, BlockChain Certified, SA, CSM,
6 年Beautifully explained!
Technical Solution Owner, lapsed agile coach, building better worlds
6 年The 3 questions were deprecated to suggestions in the last update, one of the few good things in the update.
Product Leader | MBA
6 年The Scrum Guide says these are questions you **MIGHT** use. The guide is a guide it is not a prescription. Some of the best teams I have seen that do a daily standup/scrum walk the board. 1) set the stage (Why are we here, what is our goal, what does our burn down look like) 2) what are our impediments so we address those first 3) what did WE do (clearing WIP) 4) what can we do to accomplish our sprint goal. That includes pairing/mobbing/swarming.
Angel Investor, Business and Agile Leadership Coach, Organisation Transformer, Pragmatist, Strategist.
6 年So Sad over the close to 10 years I have been looking at the scrum guide it has become less and less valuable. Its become general and vanilla as it tries to be all thing for all people on that journey its coming closer to worthless every release.