Scrum Boards vs Kanban: 11 Major Differences


This is due to the costs of staffing key roles — typically, a product owner, product manager and scrum leader. A Series B company that has several development teams and yields a million-plus in revenue is in a good position to adopt scrum, he said. Ultimately, maintaining a smooth-flowing kanban board comes down to responsible stewardship. It doesn’t have specific roles, like Scrum Master or Product Owner. This means you have to find the opportunity to learn, talk, and add new work during the workflow. It sounds rigid, but properly implemented it helps you to keep up the delivery time and bring the business value when it’s needed.

In Kanban, activities are not usually tied together in such a way. Scrum teams using Kanban as a visual management tool can get work delivered faster and more often. Prioritized tasks are completed first as the team collectively decides what is best using visual cues from the Kanban board. If needed, the team leader can select due dates for some projects to guide the team’s performance. However, products and processes are delivered continuously based on the current needs.

Overview of scrum vs. Kanban

It’s the collective responsibility of the entire team to collaborate on and deliver the tasks on the board. Not only must the scrum master live up to their name, but the team requires a level of experience, too. If your scrum master or team is not up to snuff, there’s going to be trouble. Likewise, if the tasks are not well-defined, then you’re going to have inaccuracies. Of course, that’s true in any project, but it’ll come fast and furious in a scrum environment. This should be an interesting contest, as there are many similarities between scrum and kanban that make them evenly matched.

when to use kanban vs scrum

Because of how effective they can be for visualizing work, Kanban boards are a key component of most project management tools. If you’re looking to choose the right project management tool for your team, make sure it offers Kanban what is scrumban as a view. Better yet, look for a tool that allows you to view work in multiple ways. For example, in Asana, Boards View is one of four ways you can view work, in addition to Timeline View, Calendar View, and List View.

Keep the Columns Simple

You’re not on an engineering, product, or software development team. Scrum runs on sprints, which are typically two-week work cycles. At the end of a sprint, you have a collection of finished work—no matter what that work is.

During stand-ups, teams can also benefit from measuring progress towards sprint goals, reviewing a sprint burndown, understanding workload distribution, and more. Scrum boards are similar to Kanban boards, but they also include additional information such as sprints and estimated time to completion . Sprint planning is an important part of Scrum, and scrum boards help managers keep track of what needs to be done during each sprint. Like Kanban boards, Scrum boards can also help managers visualize task progress and identify bottlenecks in the workflow. Put into practice, teams tend to use traditional scrum processes like sprints. However, instead of using a scrum board, they use kanban boards to monitor progress and improve processes.

Best Project Management for Kanban: Trello

The question of whether to emphasize elements of Kanban or Scrum frequently lies with the nature of the work and the team’s desire for more or less structure in their process. Agileteams who want more structure and definition can benefit from the guidance Scrum provides. Agile teams who prefer more flexibility, experimentation, and analytics often benefit from a focus on Kanban. Kanban works well when used alongside Scrum or any other Agile method. Basically, Kanban can be applied to visualize and improve the flow of work, regardless of the methodology being used to do the work.

when to use kanban vs scrum

Scrum is structured in a way best suited to professionals and highly experienced team members. It may prove difficult for recruits to follow through effectively. If the team consists of non-experts, there may be delays at each sprint.

Scrum: The most popular Agile framework

The board is split into categories of work to be done, work in progress, and completed work, and teams can add more categories as necessary to better visualize their process. Each task is recorded on a Kanban card, which moves from column to column on the board as it moves through the team’s process. While you might hear it talked about as a distinct methodology, Agile project management more correctly refers to a category of methodologies that includes Scrum and Kanban. Still, there are fundamental differences between Agile and Waterfall project management.

  • It allows teams to build products iteratively & incrementally and respond to changes effectively, quickly, and efficiently.
  • It was developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, two members of The Agile Alliance, and described in The Scrum Guide.
  • They also review the previous day’s work and plans for the upcoming day’s tasks.
  • The Scrum boards show the tasks that are to be completed by the project team within a certain timeframe.
  • Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka recorded these early ideas in a now-famous HBR articletitled The New New Product Development Game.
  • This is compared to Kanban, where there are no expressly unique roles, and cooperation is significantly increased.

This also involves you gauging upfront how well execution teams adapt the methodology and how well the overall environment will embrace the process to deliver value. This is important, as teams are dependent and have to work collaboratively. Kanban develops a flow between each of the teams and their WIP and delivery sequence.

Scrum vs. Kanban: Are You Ready to Rumble?!

Project management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end that is undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. In scrum, teams work https://globalcloudteam.com/ within time-boxed sprints, where the goal is to build functional deliverables that provide value to stakeholders by the end of each sprint. Communication, self-assessment, and feedback are paramount to scrum, and help inform improvements for the next sprint.

when to use kanban vs scrum