Monday, March 04, 2013

Could Kanban be defined in a "Scale-free" manner?

Scale-free or scale-invariant processes are like fractals. They work independently of scale - from the intergalactic to the molecular if you like. Could a scale-free definition exist for an agile process such as Kanban - a process that would be robust and effective from the personal and small team scale to the scale of whole or multiple enterprises?
The Wiener process (random or Brownian variation) is scale-invariant (from Wikipedia)

I've recently returned from three days in Hamburg on +David Anderson's Kanban masterclass and this was one of the questions that was raised during the sessions. Uncontroversially Anderson stated that Kanban, like agile processes such as Scrum, XP and FDD, is not scale-free. Different definitions of Kanban exist at different scales. Personal Kanban applies to individuals and small teams. It uses a subset of the methods and techniques defined in Anderson's Blue Book and may have other techniques which are not applicable at higher levels. Equally Portfolio Kanban, which does not yet have a reference text, but exists in the experience of enterprises applying Kanban to multiple interconnected organisations and projects, is different enough to smaller-scale flavours of Kanban to be considered different in essence, not just in scale. 

I admit to finding this discussion frustrating since I think there is at least the possibility of defining Kanban in a scale-free manner. This would not be true of Scrum for example because the "immutable" roles, artifacts, events, and rules of Scrum are specific to the single-team scale. When you scale Scrum, even to a single scrum of scrums, the rules and practice have to be different at the larger scale. If we take the Blue Book definition of Kanban it maybe suffers from exactly the same problem. But the book is too large to be the process definition. Chapter 2 of the book might be a candidate, but it is not specific enough nor contains enough detail to test compliance.

I'm looking forward to the publication of a basic Kanban definition - Anderson stated it was in the pipeline - as my own feeling is that it should aim to be scale-free, at least over these three levels. Anderson positions Kanban as a process for organisation improvement in the knowledge work space. As such the practices relate to how to visualise work and improve, rather than the specifics of organising teams or indeed software development. At least at the first level of definition - the simplest and sparsest definition - keeping it scale-free should be both possible and useful.


Postscript: A possible candidate for a scale-free process is Feynman's Algorithm:
  1. Write down the problem.
  2. Think real hard.
  3. Write down the solution.
One could argue this is a process only for a single person - I'm sure he intended it that way. But arguably it is scale-free. It's just the difficult and interesting part of the process as far as team problem solving is concerned (how do you write down the problem? how do you think together? how do you write down the solution) remains completely obscured. In the end it is only a trivial scale-free process.

Is there such a thing as a (non-trivial) scale-free agile process?

3 comments:

Andy said...

From +MichaelBurrows:
I've explored this in some of my talks, coming to the conclusion that portfolio-level kanban (say) might be better off not trying to look the same as the kanban that's tied to a single value stream. But it's very cool that the principles and practices of the Kanban method still apply as written (also that they say nothing IT-related). It works down to personal level too, though-de-emphasising all but two of the practices.

Unknown said...

Something for you two to debate in Mayrhofen?

Andy said...

Indeed - hope I make there. :-)

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