Doing Kanban? You need a Well-Formed Team™

Kanban Board and Team

For anyone who’s studied the Kanban Method, you know there are four foundational principles and practices (more on those in a future post). They’re what most folks talk about when the subject of Kanban arises. However, there are several core values as well, nine of them in fact, woven into Kanban.

For the sake of this blog, let’s focus on just these few values:

  • Transparency
  • Collaboration
  • Agreement
  • Respect
  • Balance

When applied as internalized behaviors, consider what the conjunction of these values permits a group to accomplish together. What you’ve arrived at is a pretty good description of the behaviors of a Well-Formed Team. In particular, the behavior of the Team Swarm. We at 3Back have been writing about the Well-Formed Team for years, and we believe these behaviors are essential for both Scrum and Kanban. The Team Swarm is effectively the realization of the five Kanban core values highlighted above, which are exhibited by a Well-Formed Team as they carry out their work.

Stated a little differently:

By applying respect, balance, and transparency to our interactions with others, and establishing sound working agreements as a team; our collaborative efforts lead to greater agility.

Making sure that ‘the right people have the right conversations at the right time’ and that these conversations are driven by their shared values, leads to a pattern of service delivery that any Kanban practitioner wants to foster in their organization.

Interested in exploring how Kanban can add to your Scrum and Agile success?
We’ve got training for that.