Comparing Kanban and Scrum

Is pointless.

Yes everyone has an opinion, and a strong opinion at that.

Including me, especially me.

Everyone has an opinion except the people that really matter. I'm talking about the executives in charge of those multi hundred million dollar IT transformations going on right now. The ones responsible for integrating all those legacy systems to support that latest M and A.

The folks responsible for determining the who, the what, and the how for the technology landscape that will support corporate America (and in my case Canada) into the next century are almost all completely ignorant of what agile is, and what agile means. They still think waterfall is the way to go. They think agile is a toy to be used by post graduates to create cute applications that play on teenagers' iPhones.

I see this every day where I work, and I see a lot of big IT programs here. I have have seen some very large scale IT transformations started recently based entirely on more command and control, more governance, and more standardization.

This is the big killer whale that we all need to face. A prevalence of a mindset that is hostile to agile principles, and sees self organization as a threat.

Yes, the tide is slowly turning, but its also going backwards in lots of places. There is a ton of work for us to do. Best we do it together.

Describing Agile as a Set of Process Patterns

A couple of us are Thinkimg about how to visualize our approach to project delivery within the Deloitte LEAN crew (yes people at big consulting forms document their methodologies amd tools, even the guys with a more agile bent).

One universal truth for us is that we have never use the same set of techniques twice. Sure we reuse select practices, but they we always being tweaked, amd something else is always getting mixed in. Experience ranges from RUP, to all mainstream flavours of agile, to Kanban amd Lean, with us just beginning to play with Lean Startup methods.

With that in mind I came up with the following illustration, loosely based on the original GOF patterns diagram at the beginning of the book. All the diagram may seem overwhelming, the beauty of it is that you can start anywhere you want, and likewise stop, depending on your context.

A Map of Lean Agile Accelerators I Use

When ever the Deloitte LEAN crew helps our clients delivery business applications we typically reach out for a familiar set of practices, principles and thinking tools.

As a first step towards explaining how Deloitte LEAN approaches delivery I mapped out some of the concepts we tend to fall back on.