Agile Coaches' Corner Eric Landes on Kanban Metrics in the Scrum Framework
Joining Dan Neumann on today’s episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast is return guest and fellow AgileThought colleague, Eric Landes.
Eric comes from a DevOps background, originally starting out as a developer. Currently, he serves as a Senior DevOps Consultant, ALM Director and Solutions Architect. In his roles, he helps clients deliver value to customers in their software delivery pipeline, and has tons of experience leading organizations in adopting agile and Lean frameworks, like Scrum and Kanban. His specialties are in agile project management, Lean software development, enterprise project management implementation, and many more.
In this week’s episode, Dan and Eric are exploring the topic of Kanban metrics and the Scrum framework, how to use the two together, and finding the best place to start.
Key Takeaways
- How using Kanban with Scrum helps teams:
- Gives predictability with data
- Gives even more metrics than Scrum to help teams communicate to the customer about what they can expect
- Gives confidence levels (though, not a commitment)
- Brings in metrics and data to drive a team’s high-probability plan
- Gives data and metrics for continuous improvement
- Helps to adapt a team’s delivery process
- Key Kanban metrics within a Scrum framework:
- Throughput as a measure of predictability
- Work item aging as a leading indicator for your team
- Service level expectations to forecast within Scrum
- Key practices in using Kanban:
- Working with WIP limits to boost predictability and improve cycle times and throughputs
- Using work item aging and WIP limits together
- Little’s Law
- The less work-in-progress, the better your team can keep a steady pace and achieve good workflow
- Replacing ‘agreement’ with ‘expectations’ through the service level expectation
- Issues that can arise within teams and things to avoid:
- Increasing WIP Limits
- Not meeting forecasts
- How Eric recommends getting started:
- Track Cycle Time and use the Cumulative Flow Diagram template
- Collect data daily
- Mentioned in this Episode:
- Eric Landes’ Book Pick
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