Why /not/ Kanban

I’ve been asked for my opinion on Kanban (pronounced “kine-bine”) recently, and I have to say my initial reaction when I see a Kanban board is:  “Wow.  That’s small-batch waterfall!”

Ken Schwaber (co-creator of Scrum) wrote a post in June that expands this observation:

I was told that Kanban is frequently used when an organization cannot readily adopt Scrum. Many of Scrum’s most difficult aspects are then sidestepped. Managers are still in charge of telling people what to do. People can be interrupted at any time. People are still work in functional silos, preserving the jobs of functional managers. People are not allowed to work in containers, sharing skills and knowledge to bring complexity into solutions – instead they are worked on a pull (more sophisticated than push) production line.

Lean is more productive than waterfall. Its transparencies and metrics allow frequent adjustments to optimize productivity. However, that optimized productivity is creativity when people are used to solve complex problems. People are worked like cogs in a machine, and their work is optimized at the bit level, rather than being aggregated into the value level.

God help us. People found ways to have slack in waterfall, to rest and be creative. With Lean and Kanban, those hiding places are removed. We now have a progressive death march without pause.

Not exactly something I want to get involved with nor be a part of encouraging teams to adopt.  By “slack”, Schwaber isn’t advocating being a “slacker” - rather that time-outs are important parts of being in an intensely creative and complex project.  Kanban seems to view its people as “resources” that are swapped in and out on a pull-basis through various phases.  The last refuge for those that can’t work in an empirically-based process or tolerate inspect and adapt cycles.

More importantly, what I find lacking in Kanban is any sense of purpose – with the container obliterated (ie. the “sprint”) so is the sprint goal.  So is the definition of “done”.  And thus, the “progressive death march without pause”.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to work that way – it diminishes the role of the team as collaborative problem solvers.