ITRP projects and Kanban

Project implementation teams and maintenance teams certainly benefit from agile methodologies because it mainly reduces confusion and offers transparency. The benefits of Kanban are:

1. transparency in the context of project progression

2. transparency in the context of pressing problems

3. faster task completion

4. lower resistance during adoption

5. faster non bureaucratic response to changes

Kanban itself is not a full project management method – it is more of an idea of how projects could be managed by the team itself.

IT people appreciate that they can respond to changes quickly, that they can easily iterate and that they select what to do, so it gives them more autonomy.

On the other hand, a flexible system like Kanban can make it difficult to focus and push a project to completion if not careful enough. There is less set in stone, and no process to make sure the project is continuing smoothly – so it easily happens that a project loses direction.

Combine traditional project management with agile

To have more control over projects it might be a good idea to combine traditional project management with agile.

That way the business or business representatives in IT control the input and output factors of the agile development and can make sure to not loosing direction.

IT people can work with their Kanban system and appreciate the flexibility.

Conclusion

Agile alone might not be enough. Traditional alone might not work either, because IT people work not at their best if too much control is enforced. So combining both, might be worth a try.