Board Tyranny in Iterations and Flow

I was at an experience report at Agile 2016 last week, Scaling Without Frameworks-Ultimate Experience Report. One of the authors, Daniel Vacanti said this:

Flow focuses on unblocking work. Iterations (too often) focus on the person doing the work.

At the time, I did not know Daniel’s twitter handle. I now do. Sorry for not cc’ing you, Daniel.

Here’s the issue. Iteration-based agile, such as Scrum, limits work in progress by managing the scope of work the team commits to in an iteration. Scrum does not say, “Please pair, swarm or mob to get the best throughput.”

Possible Scrum Board. Your first column might say “Ready”

When the team walks the board asking the traditional three questions, it can feel as if people point fingers at them. “Why aren’t you done with your work?” Or, “You’ve been working on that forever…” Neither of those questions/comments is helpful. In Manage It! I suggested iteration-based teams change the questions to:

• What did you complete today?
• What are you working on now?
• What impediments do you have?

Dan and Prakeet discussed the finger-pointing, blame, and inability to estimate properly as problems. The teams decided to move to flow-based agile.

Possible Kanban board. You might have a first column, “Analysis”

Often—and not all the time—the team learns to pair, swarm, or mob because of the WIP limits.

Iteration-based agile and flow-based agile both manage the team’s work in progress. Sometimes, iteration-based agile is more helpful because the iterations provide a natural cadence for demos and retrospectives.

Sometimes, flow-based agile is more helpful because the team can manage interruptions to the project-based work.

Neither is better in all cases. Both have their uses. I use personal kanban inside one-week iterations to manage my work and make sure I reflect on a regular basis. (I recommend this approach in Manage Your Job Search.)

In the experience report, Daniel and Prateek Singh spoke about the problems they encountered with iteration-based agile. In iterations, the team focused on the person doing the work.  People took stories alone. The team had trouble estimating the work so that it would fit into one iteration. When the team moved to flow-based agile, the stories settled into a more normalized pattern. (Their report is so interesting. I suggest you read it. Page down to the attachment and read the paper.)

The tyranny was that the people in teams each took a story alone. One person was responsible for a story. That person might have several stories open. When they walked the board, it was about that one person’s progress. The team focused on the people, not on moving stories across the board.

When they moved to flow, they focused on moving stories across the board, not the person doing the stories. They moved from one person/one story to one team/a couple of stories. Huge change.

One of the people who read that tweet was concerned that it was an unfair comparison between bad iterations and good flow. What would bad flow look like?

I’ve seen bad flow look like waterfall: the team does analysis, architecture, design specs, functional specs, coding, testing in that order. No, that’s not agile. The team I’m thinking of had no WIP limits. The only good thing about their board was that they visualized the work. They did not have WIP limits. The architect laid down the law for every feature. The team felt as if they were straightjacketed. No fun in that team.

You can make agile work for you, regardless of whether you use iterations or kanban. You can also subvert agile regardless of what you use. It all depends on what you measure and what the management rewards. (Agile is a cultural change, not merely a project management framework.)

If you have fallen into the “everyone takes their own story” trap, consider a kanban board. If you have a  ton of work in progress, consider using iterations and WIP limits to see finished features more often. If you never retrospect as a team, consider using iterations to provide you a natural cadence for retrospectives.

As you think about how you use agile in your organization, know that there is no one right way for all teams. Each team needs the flexibility to design its own board and see how to manage the scope of work for a given time, and how to see the flow of finished features. I recommend you consider what iterations and flow will buy you.