How can you use Scrum, Kanban, or Lean to improve your team's performance?

Scrum is an Agile framework based on empirical process control. It is grounded in transparency, inspection, and adaptation, and its values include courage, respect, focus, openness, and commitment. It has 3 roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner and Devs) and events such as Stand-up meetings, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Retrospective. All events are time-boxed, which helps individuals and teams maintain focus, leading to more productive meetings with better insights. All this takes place over a period that is usually 2 weeks but can go up to 4 weeks, which we call sprints

Scrum is an agile framework for managing and delivering complex projects. It provides a structured yet flexible approach to product development, emphasizing collaboration, transparency, and adaptability. For Improving Team Performance with Scrum: 1. Implement time-boxed iterations (sprints) to promote focus and deliver incremental value. 2. Clearly define roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team) to ensure accountability and collaboration. 3. Conduct daily stand-up meetings to enhance communication and identify potential blockers. 4. Regularly hold retrospectives to reflect on the team's performance and continuously improve processes.

Kanban can certainly be used with Scrum to track the day work and visualise the bottlenecks, some teams go a bit further with WIP limit and metrics like lead time, cycle team. Ultimately the team decides the stages and how it is managed. And no. ‘Blocked’ is not a stage, it is a state.

Kanban is a visual management method that helps teams visualize work, limit work in progress, and maximize flow. It is particularly effective for teams with continuous delivery requirements. For Improving Team Performance with Kanban: 1. Implement visual boards to represent the flow of work, making it easy to track progress and identify bottlenecks. 2. Set and enforce WIP limits to prevent overloading the team and maintain a smooth flow of work. 3. Encourage continuous improvement by regularly reviewing and refining the Kanban board and workflow. 4. Analyze and optimize cycle times to enhance predictability and delivery speed.

The very purpose of Lean is to plot your Value Stream and from the same sieve the Non Value Added Activities and Value added activities. Non-Value-added activities are also known as Waste and they are inefficiencies in the process we need to remove. Its like cleaning my house every month where I discard all the non-value stuff and keep the value added elements with me.

Lean is a methodology derived from manufacturing principles, emphasizing the elimination of waste, continuous improvement, and delivering value to the customer. For Improving Team Performance with Lean: 1. Identify and eliminate waste in processes, such as unnecessary steps or delays. 2. Map the end-to-end value stream to identify areas for improvement and streamline processes. 3. Foster a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging small, incremental changes. 4. Prioritize activities that directly contribute to delivering value to the customer.

Following are few important pointers - Understand Scrum Principles - Empower teams to become Self-Organized (although a long journey) - Effective product backlog refinement - Developing continuous improvement culture (most imp) - Seek & act on feedback from stakeholders - Developing cross-functional teams, reduce dependencies on external teams - Use right metrics, capturing just velocity, burn down chart are not enough - Provide psychological safety to experiment - Ensure leadership support

Scrum allows us to improve the team's performance in various ways: - Boards that provide transparency, thus allowing for quick action on obstacles, thereby improving the team's response time - Daily meetings that allow the team to know what each member is doing, and in this way, to organize themselves - Short feedback cycles help us understand how we are progressing; teams are motivated by customer feedback - Retrospectives that help us understand the dynamics of the team as well as improve processes

Following are few important pointers - Visualize workflow & set up WIP limit - Ensure effective pull system - Developing continuous improvement culture (most imp) - Define explicit policies for each column on the Kanban board - Use right metrics, capturing just cycle & lead time, throughput are not enough - Team to be taught to focus on VALUE - Kanban does not prescribe meetings, but better to hold regular stand up & service delivery review meetings - Seek & act on feedback from stakeholders

Following are few important pointers - Understand Lean Principles - Identify and eliminate waste - Conduct value stream mapping to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies - Prioritize lead time reduction - Capture & analyze standardized metrics & quality metrics - Implement Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) culture - Implement One-Piece Flow, helps reduce wait times and improve efficiency

To improve team performance using Scrum, Kanban, or Lean: •Scrum : Implement iterative sprints, daily stand-ups, regular retrospectives, and defined roles. •Kanban : Visualize workflow with a Kanban board and set WIP limits to optimize flow. •Lean : Eliminate waste and embrace continuous improvement (kaizen) to streamline processes and enhance efficiency.

Lean and Agile principles when used together can be impactful e.g. Value stream mapping and then creating workstream in a Kanban board is a basic area of application. VSM allows laying out the process from start to finish, current state and future state, improvement areas and effectiveness. With these being mapped, if workstreams are created in Kanban and backlogs prioritised, it'll allow to run and complete the WIPs in sprints with realistic timelines and complete co-dependent workstream methodically.

Whichever is delivery approach, following remain key factors for right delivery & customer satisfaction, seem simple, but hard to implement - Setting clear sprint goals (narrowing focus) - Writing clear acceptance criteria - Shrinking batch size (speeds up feedback loops) - Frequently integrating code (prevents merge issues) - Normalizing risks (anticipating failures) - Enhance trust factor within team - Enhance Continuous Improvement culture Target what matters, not the measurement of what matters.

here are various frameworks or methodologies you can choose from to help teams stay motivated and generate more value, so focus on the context and consider the following points: Transparency: It will help you identify team blockages Short feedback cycles: They will help you quickly adapt to a constantly changing market People: Taking time to listen to people (retrospectives), fostering good communication, and creating a safe environment will help you create healthier and more productive environments Common goals: If we organize teams around common goals where everyone understands their role, we will have motivated teams with good performance

Scrum is best at cadencing work, Kanban at visualizing flow and solving bottlenecks, Lean at simplifying processes. They aren't exclusive from each other: mix and match these frameworks and their tools to fit *your* context, address *your* needs, and make *your* team work better.