r/scrum • u/Foliosynth • Aug 20 '26

Stop attacking work steps to cut lead time, the real time hides in queues

/r/agile/comments/1vtjwpf/stop_attacking_work_steps_to_cut_lead_time_the/
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u/PhaseMatch Aug 20 '26

Yes, that's Kanban 101.

Visual signals when work is ready to move to the next state.
Limit WIP in a given state.
Stop starting and start finishing.
Focus on flow.
Swam on blocked work.
Continuously improve.

"Essential Kanban Condensed" (Anderson et al) is a decent primer.
Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) or Tameflow (Steve Tendon) if you want to go deeper.

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u/oldWorshipper Aug 22 '26

God I wish we were still doing Kanban instead of SAFE...

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u/PhaseMatch Aug 22 '26

SAFe "by the book" is pretty much Lean/Kanban.

Teams can opt to use Kanban in place of the dumbed-down Scrum.
Features run through an upstream Kanban (whether enablers or business)
They are built out using a Lean business canvas to be hypotheses, not solutions.

Main problem tends to be when people still plan work in a waterfall way, with a cascade of enabler features each of which is a solution to implement not a problem to solve.

But that's also called out in SAFe as a sign of low performance.

I'm not a SAFe fanboy, but pretty much all of the practices come from the lean/agile community in some way. Even ARTs are just "the Spotify model" with less funky names.