Transforming a Public Sector Organization

Kanban in IT

Kanban is evolutionary change for your business.  It’s about not trying to change anything….initially.  It’s about making your existing process visible and limiting your work in progress (WIP).  Some people refer to Kanban as a framework, a method, a system for managing work.    We chose Kanban because of the strong functional silos in this particular organization where we didn’t feel an Agile or Scrum approach would work.

We started by Kanbanizing functional teams and overall process.  Over time, we killed our functional Kanban boards and moved to project boards.  Was it evolutionary?  Maybe, one thought we had after-the-fact was that it could have actually reenforced the functional silos simply because people saw “requirements – > development -> test” columns on the board.  Hindsight is 20/20, we have no way of knowing if ripping the bandaid off with Scrum would have been better.