Scrumban = Greater Predictability + Agility

So I've recently been working with a Tools team, who provide infrastructure support.  Not something I'd really done before.  They were using pure Kanban, in the usual "got my list" way of doing things, with tons of stuff in progress, new urgent stuff coming straight into the top of the queue. Bigger, longer term work was just constantly being pushed out, whoever shouted loudest gets their stuff done first.  Suffice to say it was not very transparent what would get done next, or when issues further down the queue would be addressed.

We decided to go back to Scrum and workout what tools from that box we wanted to use, and at the same time realise we had two queues, one for planned work and one for urgent new stuff.

So we now use some Scrum - (Sprints and sprint backlogs, planning and retros) to address the plannable work, leaving room in the sprint for unplanned work - this comes in to our top swimlane as expedited - if it can't wait a few weeks, and is attacked in a Kanban way, with as few items in progress as possible.

The key is to stop taking in unplanned work when the capacity for the sprint is reached - people will just have to wait (hopefully not more than a week) while the planed work gets done.  This also teaches people to plan ahead, something teams are quite bad at doing when it comes to stuff outside of the teams' power to change.

R.