The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 9Kanban

Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction.

—David J. Anderson, CEO at Mauvius Group and a leader of the Kanban movement

Scrum can be disruptive. Teams immediately start doing things in a different fashion: Sprint planning, daily standups, Sprint reviews, retrospectives. There are new roles to learn: marketing owner and scrum master. We begin to estimate tasks in story points with Planning Poker.

For some teams, it's better to start gradually. Kanban allows them to “Start with what you do now” and “Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change”; these are the first two principles of Kanban. The third principle, “Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles,” tells us that we don't need to create new roles or reorganize into cross-functional teams to practice Kanban. These three principles were “chosen specifically to avoid emotional resistance to change,” according to David J. Anderson, one of the foremost proponents of Kanban.

Kanban—“a card you can see”—is a scheduling and work-management system developed by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota in the late 1940s. It is closely associated with the Lean Manufacturing philosophy that emphasizes eliminating waste and just-in-time inventory.

Kanban now shows up everywhere. If you've bought coffee at Starbucks, you've seen Kanban in action. The Starbucks cup provides a visual cue to the barista: how many shots of expresso, how many shots of which syrups, what ...