Hi Chris
The way I explain it to myself and my teams, is that there are several frameworks with the Agile methodology. Arguably, two of the most popular are the Scrum and Kanban frameworks.
The first question to ask is: 'What are you trying to achieve?'.
If the answer is that you want to manage your workflow, then a Kanban framework will help you by visualising your work, maximise efficiency by identifying bottlenecks and improve continuously. You can apply this framework to any work in your system. Not just projects.
Pros:
Simple to set up, all you need is a board.
No roles are set or defined, so no need to train out new roles
It can be customized to fit the processes and work systems that are already in place
Highly adaptable
Low overheads
Cons:
High levels of discipline to inspect and adapt
Lack of defined roles could lead to no individual or team responsibility
There are no timeframes with each phase. This can make forward planning difficult
If you have a project where there are high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, the scrum framework can help by adding containers around the work that promote the agile principles of transparency, inspection and adaption. Trying to avoid using software development as an example to show how adaptable the scrum framework it is, you could use the scrum framework to create a KPI Reporting pack for example. The vision is create a KPI pack that shows a true picture of how the department is performing in line with the organisational goals. The team know and understand the goals, but aren't clear on what the requirements are or how they will execute it. So they start by creating a sprint with the goal of producing a pack on PowerPoint, with a top level KPI for each team (this is the MVP), at the end of the sprint, the team present their MVP to the customer, adds more requirements to their backlog, prioritises and creates a goal for the next iteration to build on what they already have.
Pros:
Quicker time to market
Defines roles within a scrum team, making it easier for inexperienced teams to understand who does what
Time boxed events that can help with forward planning.
Dedicated role to guide the team through the process
Cons:
Scrum depends on cross-functional teams. While you can bring together temporary, cross functional project teams, you lose efficiencies when having to start from scratch with a new team every time.
Higher levels of training before you can begin, which can be expensive without in house programs.
My advice would be to become familiar with both frameworks and create simple experiments with various aspects. Creating an agile hybrid is perfectly acceptable if it works best for your context.
The biggest learning curve for me, using both Scrum and Kanban, and one that I am still challenging my teams on a daily basis is, 'what does complete mean?'
Try to make sure that each task covers the end to end process from start to finish. One task for one piece of work, end to end. The most simple reason is that it creates a shared understanding of what complete means. The more complex reason is that the team can identify where the work is at any given time and can swarm to complete the work, making the whole team accountable. The handy by-product is that you only have one task to maintain and update on the board, rather than three, four, five tasks for the same piece of work, for different parts of the process.
Then of course you have the humble waterfall, a bit like the grandad of the bunch, but even the old dog can learn new tricks, by adopting an agile framework, whether it be Scrum or Kanban, during the execution phase and voila, you have your self a hybrid!
These are just based on my experience, would be great to hear about others experience and perceptions of these frameworks
