Leaning Scrum for the first time can be a bit overwhelming. There are so many new terms and concepts in Scrum, which can cause us not to feel confident about which word to use. As you learn about Scrum, you may be wondering:

How are Scrum and Agile related? Are they the same? What’s the difference?

These questions are about more than just terms. They frame how you approach teamwork, collaboration and getting work done. This article will cover three essential topics to help you.

• Defining Agile and Scrum
• Who else is in the Agile family?
• How to choose what’s right for your team?

Defining Agile and Scrum

So you’re interested in Scrum? Maybe the topic came up during lunch. Or you learned about it at a conference. But then you also hear people use the term Agile, and they seem related but different. You don’t feel confident entering the conversation because you don’t know when to use which word.

This post will lay out the difference between Scrum and Agile and throw in a couple of related terms like Kanban and Lean. Afterward, you should feel comfortable jumping into the discussion and maybe digging deeper to learn more.

If you’re practicing Scrum, you’re working in an Agile way.

Agile

When people say “agile,” they usually refer to it as a mindset. Sometimes they may be referring to the movement across industries to adopt the principles of Agile, but then they’ll likely say, “agile movement.” 

Let’s take a quick look at the history of agile for some context.

The Agile Manifesto

Many agile ideas were birthed out of the software industry in the 1990s. The waterfall approach was the dominant project management perspective, and it depended on meticulous pre-planning to set the schedule, scope, and cost before proceeding. The manufacturing and construction industries significantly influenced the waterfall approach, but it needed to adapt to work for developing software.

The challenge was that the software development environment was unstable. The technology was rapidly improving, changing both the constraints on a project and what was even considered possible. A new methodology was needed to allow for more flexible and responsive software development. Instead of avoiding or mitigating change, they needed to embrace it.

Enter the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001. It’s the Agile movement’s founding document and thus an excellent place to start understanding what Agile is all about. It’s composed of four values and 12 principles.

It describes what will be true when you’re following Agile. It doesn’t nail down the specifics of how you will do it.

Instead of avoiding or mitigating change, they needed to embrace it.

Take a minute and read through the manifesto. Even if you include all the principles, it’s only 262 words long. The manifesto itself was written to address the software industry 20 years ago though it still has meaningful applications for us today. It served as an impetus for change that has grown into the agile movement.

Defining Agile

ag·ile
/ˈajəl/
adjective
Able to move quickly and easily.

This is the standard definition for agile from the Oxford dictionary. Agile as a mindset includes values and principles that allow a team to move quickly and adjust at speed and scale.

A few core concepts of Agile:

• A focus on people, conversations, and collaboration.
• Flexibility, iteration, and adaptation.
• Regularly delivering value to customers.
• Trust and empowerment within the team.

Built from values and principles, Agile is a broad umbrella for a new way of working. It describes what will be true when you’re following Agile, and it doesn’t nail down the specifics of how you will do it.

Scrum

Interestingly Scrum’s origin predates Agile’s. Scrum was initially used as a term related to project management in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in their paper “New New Product Development Game” In the Harvard Business Review. The first recorded Scrum project came a little later in 1993 from Jeff Sutherland.

Scrum is a framework for how to organize people and work in an agile way. Essential to Scrum are the three pillars of empiricism:

• Transparency. How does this make things more visible?
• Inspection. Where does this create space to evaluate?
• Adaptation. When does this encourage growth?

Understanding these pillars and the five values of Scrum will provide a foundation that will guide you in what to do and why to do it.

While also based on principles and values, it is more explicit in what things to do. If you want more specifics on Scrum, check out the rest of my What is Scrum? Guide.

Scrum and Agile as partners

Thankfully we don’t need to choose between Agile or Scrum; they work together. Agile is more of a mindset guiding how we can work, and Scrum is a specific expression of that mindset. If you’re practicing Scrum, you’re working in an Agile way. 

People often first discover Scrum, begin implementing it, and then realize there’s a lot more to being Agile. It’s helpful to understand the difference because there may be other Agile practices that fit your needs better than Scrum.

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Who else is in the Agile family?

Scrum isn’t the only expression of the Agile mindset. I’ll touch on a few others and include links if you want to learn more about them.

Kanban

Kanban is a framework developed in the 1940s by Taichi Ohno while working at Toyota in Japan. He designed it to maintain their manufacturing inventory creating a just-in-time production.

The term Kanban (看板) translated is kan (看) meaning “to see” and ban (板) meaning a “board.” The core concept is that all the work is visible on the board, from the original supplier to the final consumer. A column represents each stage, and the work at that stage is listed in the column. 

Someone can immediately see the current status of the whole process in a single glance, and you can quickly see where work is backlogged or delayed. This visibility was a massive jump in transparency, allowing the process and current status to be equally visible to everyone. 

Work in progress (WIP) measures how much work is in a given stage. WIP limits can be set for each step to quickly identify a bottleneck and encourage work to be finished so it can continue to flow through the process.

Kanban can be a good option for introducing some agile principles to an organization because it doesn’t initially require many changes. You can use a Kanban board to map how things currently work, increasing transparency and creating a space for evaluation and inspection. 

To begin using Kanban, you don’t need to change people’s roles or add new meetings like Scrum. This simplicity makes Kanban a more accessible entry point into Agile.

If you want to learn more about Kanban, Digite has an excellent comprehensive article you can check out. Here are two books to get you started.

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business 
• Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

They’re both a little older, but the concepts are still solid.

Lean

Lean is a methodology that also finds its origins in manufacturing, specifically Toyota and Motorola. As the name Lean suggests, Lean looks to reduce waste, making the process lighter and thus more agile. Lean recognizes three kinds of waste to reduce:

• Muda: activities that consume resources without providing additional value.
• Muri: the overuse of equipment or employees.
• Mura: unevenness, non-uniformity, and irregularity.

Lean focuses on efficiency balanced with its five principles, which guide how to deliver value to the customer. PMI has a good article on how to apply Lean concepts to project management

The Lean Startup is also an excellent resource for learning how you can apply lean concepts.

Nexus

Nexus is a framework for being Agile at scale. Ken Schwaber of scrum.org developed it to guide organizations that are running Scrum on multiple teams across a shared backlog. It’s a relatively new framework, beginning in 2015.

The Nexus is where these teams come together. The framework defines new roles and events to help the teams coordinate better with one another. Cross-team dependencies are one of the most common challenges of Scrum at scale. 

The Nexus framework encourages interactions to help manage those dependencies. At the same time, it maintains some of the core aspects of Scrum, like self-organizing teams, transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

You can find more resources on scrum.org.

SAFe

Dean Leffingwell created Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Like the Nexus framework, it supports scaling agile beyond a single team. Unlike Nexus, it is not explicitly focused on Scrum but more broadly encompasses the Agile principles. 

SAFe also scales more extensively than Nexus, bringing Agile principles to program and portfolio management. It seeks to reconcile the shorter iterative nature of Agile with the scale and timeline of a large organization.

If you want to learn more about SAFe, ScaledAgile has some good resources and offers trainings and certifications.

How to choose what’s right for your team?

If you’re not currently using any agile approaches and are looking to try it out, I suggest starting with Kanban. It’s the simplest and doesn’t require a change to the structure of your team, and it will likely help you identify areas where agile approaches can help you. Kanban is also great if you have a process with many distinct steps.

Scrum and lean are both excellent approaches to use on a given team. While Nexus and SAFe are helpful when you want to scale to a larger organization.

Next steps​ for applying Scrum.

Hopefully, this post provided some context to some of the Agile-related terms and practices you hear mentioned and provided paths for you to continue learning and growing.

If you want to learn more about Scrum in general, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

Still not sure about your next step with Scrum? I offer a couple of free coaching sessions each month. You can signup for a free 1-hour coaching session, and we can work together to identify a good next step for you.