Kanban vs Scrum

Hi everyone, today I want to talk about the difference between Kanban and Scrum. I wanted to to some research because they are the two most famous agile frameworks, and they are often confused one with the other.

A really good starting point can be found here, where this table is presented:

As can be seen in the table, Kanban is more focused on continuous delivery, whereas Scrum is more focused on the team structure. They core idea in Scrum is to structure the team in such a way that it can deliver changes at a constant speed (each sprint there is a backlog to complete) and the key metric is velocity.

On the other hand, Kanban does not structure the team in any specific way, but it rather enables the team to be continuously producing and at the same time changes and the status of the work can be consulted at any point in time, giving it extra flexibility.

This exposes the big difference between the two methods. Scrum aligns more with the classical way project management has been done. A project manager (called product owner in the case of scrum) is leading and controlling the teams effort with the goal of achieving a goal (the sprint). This helps scrum to be adopted by big companies.

In Kanban, the team is giving more flexibility and trust. This enables the team to just focus on one final goal, and after a phase of selecting which tasks to perform to achieve the goal, a continuous working phase is executed.

In my opinion, Kanban is more powerful than Scrum if one assumption is met. The trust needs to be given to the team and the team needs to find itself worthy of this trust. If this is true, then the overhead of a non-technical management layer is avoided and the team can perform to its maximum.
On the other hand, if that trust does not exit, Scrum can be more feasible because it allows to follow a hybrid approach between classical project management and agile methods, as experience has shown.