Both working methods, often used interchangeably, Kanban and Scrum have their distinguishing peculiarities. They share a common belonging to agile.
Scrum is applied to divide the work into small, manageable pieces to be completed by a team within a certain timeframe. The period is called a sprint and is generally 2 to 4 weeks long. No modifications are allowed after starting.
To optimize this process, Scrum relies on at least three predefined roles. The first role is the Product Owner – the person in charge for initial planning, prioritizing, and interaction with the rest of the company. The second role is the Scrum Master – the person responsible for monitoring the process during each sprint. And the third part consists of the team members in charge to carry out the purpose of each sprint.
There exist also the Daily Scrum events – 15-minutes “meetings” for the developers of the Scrum team. To reduce the complexity, the Daily Scrum event is held at the same time and place every working day of the sprint.
The Scrum Board is a commonly used tool that provides a visual representation of the workflow. It contains different accounts that move from the to-do list to the tasks in progress section. Scrum is beneficial to use when stable priorities are set, and the process is designed to allow for accurate estimations of workflow and effective management of multiple projects.
Just like Scrum, Kanban is a tool used to effectively organize projects. It encourages work to be split into manageable chunks. The method uses a Kanban Board (very similar to the Scrum Board). Where Scrum limits the amount of time to finish a particular amount of work, Kanban limits the amount of work and allows changes at any time. For example, if you are part of a marketing team that changes its tasks dynamically and moves fast, using sprints and fixing 2-3 weeks for each separate task with no option to adjust on the go, will rather fail your projects.
There are no pre-defined roles for a team. Although there may be assigned a Project Manager, the team is encouraged to collaborate and to support a team member when overwhelmed. This method is suitable for achieving a wide variety of priorities.
Besides, you can also dedicate separate workflow tasks that don’t have a huge business impact, but are important in the long run. For example, quality improvements, documentation, or process optimization. In the world of Kanban, these tasks are specifically grouped under a class of service called Intangible.
Both Scrum and Kanban have proven their worth and efficiency. Our advice is to experiment to figure out what would be most appropriate for your pile of tasks. Creating a hybrid of both is perfectly acceptable if that works for you. And finally, you can find here several tools for both methods, so you can start practicing right away.
Scrum tools – monday.com, MeisterTask, Nutcache, Jira, Targetprocess.
Kanban tools – Asana, Trello, Kanban Tool, Wrike, Bitrix24.
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