One question I like to ask myself regularly is: What would Lean software development look like if Agile development had never happened? That thought helps to clarify some of the more dubious ideas bouncing around the Agile camp.
A Scrum team, like most Agile teams, is meant to be around 5-9 people. A key practice of Scrum, common to most Agile processes, is the daily standup meeting. The daily scrum meeting enumerates each of the team members and asks them for a brief history, a brief plan, and any obstacles. The idea is to regulate productivity and identify special cause variation. The cost of the meeting is controlled by limiting it to 15 minutes (typically). This regular n-way communication helps control some of the problems that Fred Brooks described in The Mythical Man Month. In theory, Scrum looks like a closed-loop control system with two nested feedback controllers (the daily standup, and timeboxed iteration planning). That theoretical description is what got me interested in Scrum in the first place.
One of the development teams I’m working with has got upwards of 40 people all on the same kanban board. The kanban teams I’m working with also do daily standup meetings. A daily standup with 40 people could not possibly finish in 15 minutes if everybody got their turn at status reporting. But they do finish in 15 minutes with great reliability, so they must be doing something different. The kanban process revolves around workflow first, so a natural consequence is that the standup meeting enumerates work-in-process instead of headcount. Only some of the WIP requires any comment (for special causes), and then only one or two people who are involved with that special cause really need to say anything. The board itself continuously broadcasts the productivity status of the system. Upstream resources are always on the hook for delivery to their downstream customers. Productivity lapses show up on the board very quickly and stand out like a sore thumb. Lean thinking is relentlessly value driven.
A consequence of Scrum and the “scrum of scrums” is that such a small span of control will create a deep hierarchy as you scale up. That’s not very lean. A lean organization ought to be pretty flat, and a span of control of 40 is very flat indeed.
M. Hassan raza | 03-Sep-07 at 8:53 am | Permalink
I do agree with what you are saying, but hierarchy is useful as well sometimes to easily manage work and people, because when you have complete flat, than we start having issues of people no tknowing what they are supposed to do, and who is supposed to make sure that someone or something is getting done or not,
my idea is to be in middle, not too much hierarchy and not completely flat as well, somewhere in between.
Corey | 03-Sep-07 at 10:07 am | Permalink
Standardized Work and Visual Control (i.e. the kanban board) ensure that people know what they are supposed to do. This turns out to be both cheaper and more effective than throwing middlemen at the problem.
Agile Management by David Anderson | 03-Sep-07 at 10:46 pm | Permalink
Lean Scales Differently than Agile…
Corey Ladas posts his thoughts on how a kanban development team daily standup operates differently than…
Wayne Allen | 06-Sep-07 at 8:58 am | Permalink
I did the same thing back in 2003 with with a team of 25 – it worked great!
Corey | 06-Sep-07 at 9:16 am | Permalink
Outstanding! I’d love to hear more about what you did.
Wayne Allen | 07-Sep-07 at 8:26 am | Permalink
I thought I had blogged about it at the time, but can’t find it now.
We were going over our 15 min limit for stand ups and lots of people were saying things like “I paired with Bob – so what he said…” and then getting into some kind of problem that Bob didn’t comment on.
Eyes were glazing over since most of the team didn’t care about that particular problem. Even with the lead keeping people on track the stand ups were going long.
We happened to have Ward Cunningham in for a process checkup that week and he suggested we focus on the work rather than the people.
We started experimenting with changing our focus and ended up working through the story cards in priority order.
Agile Management by David Anderson | 14-Nov-07 at 5:04 pm | Permalink
How big can an effective standup be?…
This is a picture of a standup meeting on a large project at Corbis. Today I counted 41 attendees. The…
As Reuniões Diárias Funcionam para Equipes Grandes? « Acordo Coletivo (Empregados Petrobras) | 27-Oct-09 at 3:25 pm | Permalink
[...] Ladas também acrescentou suas preocupações sobre a estratégia de comunicação no scrum-of-scrums para equipes grandes. Ele disse que o scrum-of-scrums poderia criar uma hierarquia profunda à medida que ele for [...]
Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean | 19-May-11 at 9:19 pm | Permalink
[...] Corey Ladas, “Lean scales differently than Agile”. Kanban can be another possible way of scaling agile in a lean and flat way, unlike “scrum of [...]