How Kanban Can Supercharge Your Scrum Implementation

Scrum is a powerful framework for delivering value iteratively and incrementally. But in real-world implementations, teams often face challenges such as unpredictable delivery times, work piling up mid-Sprint, and uneven flow of value. That’s where Kanban comes in — not as a replacement for Scrum, but as a powerful complement.

The Scrum Better with Kanban (SBK) approach brings together the best of both worlds, using Kanban practices to make your Scrum implementation more effective, predictable, and sustainable.

Importantly, many of the improvements Kanban brings are things great Scrum Teams already do — such as making work visible, limiting work in progress, and inspecting delivery data. The power of Kanban is in making these practices explicit, giving teams shared language, structure, and metrics to apply them with more rigour and effectiveness.

1. Visualise the Work for True Transparency

Scrum already encourages transparency through the Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Sprint Review. Kanban adds another layer: a visual workflow.
By mapping your workflow on a Kanban board, you make work visible in real time — highlighting bottlenecks, dependencies, and stalled items. The board becomes a single source of truth, not just for the Development Team, but for stakeholders too.

2. Manage Flow to Increase Predictability

Many Scrum Teams measure velocity, but velocity alone doesn’t tell you when a specific item will be done.

Kanban uses lead time as its primary time-based flow metric — measuring the total time from when work enters the system to when it is delivered. This is called system lead time in SBK and David Anderson’s Kanban, and it provides a clear, end-to-end picture of delivery performance.

Alongside system lead time, teams may also track:

• Customer lead time — from initial request to delivery
• Stage-specific lead times — for parts of the workflow to identify local delays
• Throughput — how many items are completed over a given period
• Work in Progress (WIP) — how much is being worked on right now

By using these metrics, you can have data-driven conversations with stakeholders and make more reliable delivery forecasts — without over committing.

3. Limit Work in Progress to Finish More, Faster

A common Scrum challenge is having too many items in progress at once, which can lead to unfinished work at the end of the Sprint.
Kanban’s WIP limits create focus, encouraging teams to finish items before starting new ones. This improves flow, reduces context-switching, and helps teams meet their Sprint Goals more consistently.

4. Use Data to Continuously Improve

Scrum already includes the Sprint Retrospective for improvement, but Kanban provides a rich set of data and visual tools that can make those retrospectives far more insightful.

For example:

• Run charts show how lead times are trending
• Cumulative flow diagrams reveal where work is getting stuck
• Lead time distributions help identify variability in delivery times

These visuals help teams target the real causes of delay or inefficiency, rather than relying on guesswork.

5. Build Sustainable Pace and Better Collaboration

Kanban encourages teams to pull work when they have capacity, rather than pushing work onto them. This helps maintain a sustainable pace — a Scrum principle often overlooked in practice — and fosters better collaboration across the team.

Myth-Buster: Lead Time vs Cycle Time

If you come from a Scrum or general Agile background, you may be used to the distinction:

• Cycle time — time from when work actively starts to when it is finished
• Lead time — time from request to delivery

In Kanban, as defined by David J. Anderson and applied in SBK, we don’t use “cycle time” as a separate measure. Instead, we call the full start-to-finish duration lead time.

Specifically:

• System Lead Time — from when an item is committed into the Kanban system until it is delivered to the customer or end user. This is the standard measure in Kanban.
• Other Lead Times — such as customer lead time or stage-specific lead times, which can be used to uncover delays and improvement opportunities.

By focusing on system lead time, Scrum teams gain a single, clear delivery metric that aligns the whole team and stakeholders around a shared understanding of flow.

Scrum and Kanban are not competitors. Together, they create a delivery system that is both agile and predictable — one that delivers value steadily, adapts quickly, and continuously improves.

Ready to take your Scrum to the next level?
Discover our Scrum Better with Kanban (SBK) courses here.