A new professional Kanban community

There have been some exciting developments in the Kanban world in recent months. Led by Daniel Vacanti, a new professional Kanban body has been set up. The team behind it aims to create a stronger community around Kanban. Essentially, they seem to want to do for Kanban what Scrum.org did for Scrum. This new body offers several different things.

The creation and publication of the Kanban Guide offers a common understanding and baseline for Kanban. Looking very similar to the Scrum Guide, this gives a clear framework for teams wanting to implement Kanban. It doesn’t detail everything you need to do. Instead, it provides the minimum you have to do to be doing Kanban. It’s a useful guide to sense check how you’re working at the now. If your team hasn’t adopted some of this guide, it’s probably not doing Kanban. At the very least, you’re not getting the benefits from flow optimisation. The purpose of the guide in their own words:

…This guide contains a definition of Kanban and a minimum set of practices to achieve optimized flow. By reducing Kanban to its essential components, the hope is that this guide will be a unifying reference for the whole Kanban community.

Linked to the guide is Prokanban.org — whose aim is to deliver training, assessments and other learning material. Interestingly, they have a certification, along with training courses. The Professional Kanban I certification (PK I) looks to validate a level of understanding of the Kanban guide. It can be done independently or with their Applying Professional Kanban course. From the description, this looks similar to what Scrum.org is trying to do with their Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) course. It’s a course and certification which covers the essentials of the framework.

I’ve not seen any reviews yet on the new training offering. I’ve personally attended both the Kanban Management Professional (KMP) from the Kanban University and the Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK I) from Scrum.org. I particularly enjoyed the Scrum.org and got some value out of the KMP course. It will be interesting to see how this new certification complements and enhances what’s on offer out there now.

I’m excited to see where the team go next. Scrum.org has one of the best and most active communities I’ve come across. There is a real focus to improve Scrum and the conversation around practices different people have found useful. While there is no such thing as ‘best practice’, there are many good practices. There are definitely bad practices or anti-patterns. If this is the beginning of a similar journey for Kanban, the early indications seem very positive.