Sample chapter: Agile Project Management with Kanban: Adapting from Waterfall

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This chapter from Agile Project Management with Kanban will help you adapt your variation of traditional Waterfall to Kanban without much fuss or hassle.

This chapter is for people currently using a traditional Waterfall method for product development. If your team uses Scrum, please feel free to skip to the next chapter, “Evolving from Scrum.”

Kanban is simple in structure and uses common terminology. As a result, a wide range of people can begin using it without significant trouble or prolonged explanation. As with any new method, it takes a few weeks to adjust to Kanban and a few months to master it. Nonetheless, even if you learned product development decades ago, you can quickly get started and feel productive with Kanban. After a couple of months, the increases in productivity, quality, predictability, and agility should be evident and measurable to your leadership and your team.

When I talk about “traditional Waterfall,” I mean the practice of writing specs, implementing features, and performing validation in bulk (many features at once) over the course of milestones that often span months. I’ve experienced many variations of Waterfall at Microsoft, Boeing, and other places where I’ve worked.

This chapter will help you adapt your variation of traditional Waterfall to Kanban without much fuss or hassle. I’ve even included a rude Q & A listing questions that a blunt team member might ask, followed by pragmatic answers meant to reassure, build trust in the new approach, and clearly explain how to achieve great results with Kanban.

The topics covered are:

  • Introducing Kanban to a Waterfall team
  • Working in feature teams
  • Completing features before starting new ones
  • Dealing with specs and bugs
  • Engaging with customers
  • Celebrating performance improvements
  • Rude Q & A
  • Checklist

Read the complete chapter here: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2316388.