Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

My current employer switched from SCRUM to KANBAN. We're broken up into person squads. Epics are created by product by engineers are involved in kickoff and story breakdown.

We use KANBAN cycle times to estimate delivery dates. For example, my squad completes 85% of stories in 5 days. Given that, the number of stories in the epic, and number of engineers, it's easy math to calculate an approximate completion date.

It's important to note that we've convinced management that these are approximate completion dates, not deadlines. The dates are used for planning upcoming features and which squad will be free first to take it on. However, there's still plenty of adaptability.

Of all the places I've worked, this model is one that I've found to be the most productive.

> For example, my squad completes 85% of stories in 5 days. Given that, the number of stories in the epic, and number of engineers, it's easy math to calculate an approximate completion date.

Until it turns out that the remaining 15% takes half of the total time. In my experience, estimating about 80-90% of a project accurately isn't that difficult; it's the other 10-20% that can end up taking considerably longer than you expected and throwing off the entire estimate.

I really, really like Kanban as well. Seems the hardest part is selling it to upper management.

Because they want hard deadlines. I don’t think this is something that can be “fixed”. I think it’s something you discover in an interview and use as a make or break join/pass decision if you truly care about it.

For us kanban was an easier sell to management than scrum, because they wanted frequent changes more than hard deadlines.

Interesting. Who made the decision to switch and who pitched it to execs? In my experience an executive is the only one who can make this decision. Extremely curious how this worked out.

It should be up to the team to decide the process that works best for them. FWIW that's what agile manifesto says also. Agile is not equal to scrum btw.

I hear ya. “Should be” and “is” are quite different though ;-)

Have you worked for companies where teams choose their preferred project management styles? If so, which companies?

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