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Comment by synu | Hacker News Reader

The Kanban book by David Anderson was all about this, but it never caught on like Scrum did. If I’m feeling cynical I think its because there were no certifications to charge for and no strange new roles for middle managers.

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That is unfortunate indeed. The basic idea that you can run a software team by collecting a set of useful and moderately sized projects to do and then picking the most important ones to do first is reasonable enough. It's the extra process that goes way too far, full of formulaic time-wasting meetings and participants whose roles need silly names because no-one can explain or justify them on merit alone. But it's hard to sell tickets to a conference where the keynote speech is five minutes long and the same as last year.

We tried kanban with a few teams at my last startup. It worked great for a team with a clear direction, but was really hard from a management/planning/accountability standpoint. It didn't mesh well with the quarterly planning cycle the rest of the company aligned on. So we took some of the key tools (like WIP limits) but otherwise moved to scrumban type process. It was a bummer, because we had some solid data on increased productivity, but couldn't really deliver increased predictability (not that scrum was more predictable in-practice, it just seems that way)

Kanban isn't an externally facing interface. Quite honestly Scrum and story mapping isn't that good for a whole of company approach.

You need to use tools like OKRs and good old waterfall to manage multiple team projects.

> (not that scrum was more predictable in-practice, it just seems that way)

I use the phrase “the illusion of predictability” a lot when I talk about Scrum. Sadly, some people really cling to that illusion despite overwhelming evidence that it isn’t real.

i dont think that is cynicism. ideas need to be commodified for corporate use or else HR / recruiting does not know what to do with it.

it has nothing to do with corporate use, it has to do with human use. Deep understanding of ideology just doesn't scale. You can look at any topic in nearly any field and the majority of users will reduce it to a set of heuristics and simple actions rather than understanding the foundational ideas from the most basic principles and building up to the why of actions - and then undertaking them within the an authentic respect for those principles.

Dealing with anything social, the rules don't self enforce - they aren't gravity.

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