Continuous increment with kanban visual management
Description
The main characteristic of technical Scrum is the use of sprint pulses to employ timeboxing as the driver of progress. Continuous increment with kanban is an alternative: instead of packaging work into closed iterations, the team maintains a constant flow of tasks regulated by WIP limits.
The original Scrum teams observed and described by Nonaka and Takeuchi did not prescribe the use of a specific increment tactic: incremental development can be achieved either with sprints or with a continuous flow of tasks.
Achieving that flow without sprints has its own challenges:
- Bottlenecks do not become visible at the end of the sprint; instead, they block progress in real time.
- Idle time in areas with no tasks is immediately visible on the board.
- The absence of sprints removes the urgency of the timebox, which requires additional discipline to avoid procrastination.
The kanban board addresses these challenges: it makes bottlenecks visible in real time, imposes discipline through WIP limits, and allows the team to act on problems before they turn into delays.
Common mistake
Using the kanban board only to visualize work, without managing the flow. A board without WIP limits merely tracks the status of tasks: it does not improve the flow or actively detect bottlenecks. What sets Kanban apart from other forms of visual management is precisely that WIP limits force the team to resolve flow problems before adding more work to the system.
References
- Nonaka, Ikujiro; Takeuchi, Hirotaka. (1986). "The New New Product Development Game". Harvard Business Review, January 1986.
See also
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