Working agile with scrum

Beside my desk at home is a whiteboard with coloured sticky notes. This is my personal kanban. When it comes to implementing agile working within a professional team, my company is committed to scrum. I’ve heard my team’s concerns about the flexibility of scrum, although the reasoning for this framework being imposed by the company is understandable: scrum helps management improve estimates of project end dates, which also helps our customers.

It can be tempting to compare scrum and kanban and pick a favourite. I’m avoiding this. As part of a company that has a scrum setup in place, I’m taking this opportunity to fully immerse myself and try to contribute to developing my team’s scrum habits. This should position me better for the future when I do need to compare different implementations of agile. However, for my own work at home – with a team size of 1 – I’ll stick with kanban, using my trusty whiteboard and sticky notes.