Inception

New Gig

Having come into the team around 3 months ago, I've been listening to people's experiences from previous releases and also making my own observations of the way we make decisions and communicate.

There are a few things I've picked up from that:

1. Business people are asking for visibility/control of maintenance work
2. Maintenance work is not prioritised
3. Juggling priorities (project/maintenance) is difficult for some of us
4. I feel we're working on too much at once and could be more focussed

Where I looked for inspiration

My previous 13 years have been either scrum-centric or XP-centric (i.e. iteration management).

My initial temptation was to simply re-introduce scrum and I was having a think about which bits to introduce, how to make work visible to the team and other stakeholders etc.

I was trying to think of ways to avoid the resistance to change I've experienced in the past with scrum. I was also reflecting on my experiences of scrum and realising that it often didn't fix the "too much going on" issue.

Feeling a little ignorant, I started looking around for wisdom and inspiration:

• I asked the team what they thought
• We have a great UX team, I chatted with them
• We have some cool project walls around, so I asked other PMs
• I phoned a friend

Trigger point

I had heard about Kanban a few times, but never had a chance to read much about it.

In August, I went along to the Agile Sydney meetup, where Jason Yip gave a very informative presentation about Kanban.

I immediately liked it, in particular because:

• It's minimalistic and non-prescriptive
• It's simple and easy to introduce
• It seems to directly address the "too much work" issue
• It appears to be compatible with the other practices in our team
• I liked the WIP/done concept for our wall

Over the next couple of days as I started to spout on about it, our lead developer mentioned he'd proposed Kanban in the past and is also keen.

He gave me a paper copy of "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both" (which is also available free online. I read it overnight and was keen, so we decided to give it a go.