One of my favorite links is Henrik Kniberg’s “mini-book” on Kanban and Scrum and how they work (and how they are similar and different). Given that description of Kanban and my thoughts on story prep and story release work, I would really love to try a Kanban board for story prep and release work with a Scrum board for implementation work. Definitely for prep and implementation - release probably depends how that process looks - perhaps one release board for a program (multiple projects but one solution).
Backlog grooming would actively work the story prep board. The team could see what stories are getting ready for planning as well as a release team (or management team) seeing what is getting ready for release to production. I think that it would actually engage those team members that are at the daily standup but are not developers or testers - they can point to what they are working on - its just on the story prep kanban board. I think that it could make for a good information radiator for a wider “team”.
The other way to look at this, from a metrics standpoint, is to see that the whole Scrum board is just one column of a larger Kanban board and that you could measure and reduce the throughput time of a story from backlog to released to production on that larger Kanban board.
Has anyone ever done anything like this? Did it work? Things to improve about it?
Putting this post together, I just noticed Henrik’s Kanban and Scrum - Making the Most of Both - something new to read!