Here the the slides from my presentation "Kanban and Scrum - a practical guide" from QCon in San Francisco today. The presentation is mostly pictures. If you are curious about what I was saying, check out the free online book "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both".

Great feedback! 77 green notes, 7 yellow, 0 red. Someone even wrote "there should have been a greener one!" Always fun with an enthusiastic audience, thanks everyone :o)



Take-away points:

• Know your goal
  • Hint: Agile/Lean/Kanban/Scrum isn’t it.
• Never blame the tool
  • Tools don’t fail or succeed. People do.
  • There is no such thing as a good or bad tool. Only good or bad decisions about when, where, how, and why to use which tool.
• Don’t limit yourself to one tool
  • Learn as many as possible.
  • Compare for understanding, not judgement.
• Experiment & enjoy the ride
  • Don’t worry about getting it right from start; you won't.
    
  • The only real failure is the failure to learn from failure.

Here is some of my other stuff that was referenced during the presentation:

• Kanban vs Scrum (article)
• Scrum checklist
• Kanban kick-start example
• One day in Kanban Land (cartoon)
• Cause-effect diagrams - a pragmatic approach to root-cause analysis (article)

Here is a detailed example of a fairly typical 2-tier Kanban board, for teams that know the basics of Kanban and are taking their first steps towards implementing it in practice.

Translations: German

It is sort of like a code example, or a condensed Kanban patterns repository. Print it out and use it as a source of ideas & inspiration as you evolve your own board.



If you know Scrum but are new to Kanban you might want to read Kanban vs Scrum first.