The age-old question; Kanban or Scrum? Let’s ground the debate in first principles and practical signals, not dogma.
Choosing a workflow framework shouldn’t feel like choosing a religion; you’re picking a system to manage risk, flow, and learning.
What Is Kanban, Really?
Kanban is not “Scrum without Sprints,” and it’s not just a board with swim lanes. It is a pull-based, flow-optimizing method built to help teams visualize work, reduce overload, and improve throughput with less drama. It tends to fit best when work is continuous, interrupt-driven, or when you want improvement without changing roles overnight.
Four Core Principles
- Start with what you do now; map reality before changing it.
- Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change; small, safe steps; no big-bang reorg.
- Respect current roles and responsibilities; avoid needless trauma; let improvements speak for themselves.
- Encourage acts of leadership at every level; continuous improvement belongs to everyone.
Six General Practices
| Practice | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Visualize the workflow | Make invisible work visible; expose bottlenecks and handoffs. |
| Limit Work in Progress (WIP) | Prevent overload; improve focus; reduce cycle time. |
| Manage flow | Measure lead/cycle time; stabilize the system before accelerating it. |
| Make policies explicit | Remove ambiguity; enable autonomy; reduce “hidden rules.” |
| Implement feedback loops | Build learning into the system; replenishment, reviews, standups. |
| Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally | Use data + small experiments to evolve process without breaking trust. |
Kanban’s Key Metrics & Tools
- Lead time vs cycle time; know how long customers really wait.
- Throughput; count items completed per time unit.
- WIP; your operational thermostat.
- Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD); spot bottlenecks at a glance.
- Flow efficiency; working time ÷ total lead time.
Pro tip; Aim for stability before speed. A predictable system can always be accelerated later; an unstable system burns people and lies with metrics.
Day-in-the-Life of a Kanban Team
| Time | Activity | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 | Daily Flow Review; scan the board; unblock stuck items | Keeps flow smooth; replaces “commitment ceremony” with real-time flow steering. |
| 10:00–12:00 | Focus time on highest-priority work | Pull after finishing; not on a clock; finish work before starting more work. |
| 13:30 | Replenishment meeting (when “Ready” threshold is hit) | Stakeholders replenish the Ready queue based on capacity and policy. |
| 15:30 | Metrics glance; update CFD | Continuous sensing; improves predictability and exposes true bottlenecks. |
| End of day | Kaizen huddle if anomalies show up | Micro-retros drive evolutionary improvement without waiting for a big ceremony. |
No Sprint Planning, no hard timeboxes; the rhythm flexes around flow signals. However, notice the team is still “meeting”; collaboration doesn’t disappear, it just becomes more continuous and more data-informed.
Kanban vs Scrum; A Practical Decision Tree
Use this quick diagnostic to choose; or blend; your approach. You’re not marrying a framework; you’re choosing constraints and feedback loops.
Q1; Is your work feature-centric with clear increments that benefit from timeboxed focus?
- Yes; go to Q2
- No; Kanban likely fits; proceed to implement a flow board and WIP limits
Q2; Do stakeholders demand a steady cadence of commitments and reviews?
- Yes; Scrum offers disciplined Sprint boundaries; consider Scrum or Scrumban
- No; go to Q3
Q3; Is the team’s work highly interrupt-driven (support, ops, ad-hoc requests)?
- Yes; Kanban; or a Kanban-heavy Scrumban variant
- No; go to Q4
Q4; Does the organization already run multiple Scrum teams with synchronized review events?
- Yes; Scrum may scale more cleanly; keep Sprint cadence
- No; Kanban delivers quick wins without rewriting org charts
Hybrid path; If you answered “it depends” more than twice, experiment with Scrumban; keep Scrum’s roles and key cadences, but apply Kanban’s explicit policies and WIP limits inside the Sprint to improve flow.
Common Myths; Busted
| Myth | Reality |
|---|---|
| “Kanban has no planning.” | Kanban plans continuously through replenishment and explicit policies. |
| “Scrum teams can’t use Kanban boards.” | Visualization and WIP limits can supercharge Scrum flow and reduce spillover. |
| “Kanban is easier, so start there.” | Kanban’s discipline lives in policies and data; ignore those and chaos returns fast. |
Getting Started; A 30-Day Kanban Experiment
- Map your workflow; use stickies or Miro; include queues and blockers.
- Set initial WIP limits; make them visible and treat them as hypotheses.
- Add explicit policies; Definition of Done, pull rules, classes of service.
- Track two metrics; start with lead time and WIP; add flow efficiency later.
- Hold weekly kaizen reviews; adjust one variable at a time.
Within a month you’ll have baseline data that removes guesswork from your next improvement; and you’ll know whether Kanban is stabilizing flow or simply exposing deeper constraints.
Next Step; Kanban Immersion Workshop
Ready to turn theory into muscle memory? Join our Kanban Immersion class and spend two days:
- Building a real CFD from your work items,
- Stress-testing WIP limits with simulations,
- Designing classes of service that align with customer urgency.
My simple rule of thumb; if you know a lot about what you are doing (high repetition, low uncertainty, clear handoffs), Kanban is a great fit. If you don’t know a lot yet (high uncertainty, cross-functional discovery, complex increments), Scrum can provide the structure to learn faster. And if you have a high degree of unplanned work, you can still use Scrum; reserve capacity for interrupts and use the remainder to deliver time-sensitive outcomes.