Clinton Keith's name is associated with Scrum. His website even proclaims it boldly. But recently Clinton has been doing a lot more with kanban. He had a kanban/lean pull system presentation at Agile 2008 and now this Gamasutra article. It's really well worth reading, though its heavy reference to manufacturing plants is not to my personal taste. Clinton reports that using kanban has shrunk lead time on lgame evel production activities by 56%.

In the example above, the team went from producing a level every 16 weeks to producing a zone every week. With seven zones per level, the ultimate improvement to level production was 56%.

This snippet provides some background ...

Asset creation is deterministic and sequential work that does not fit the Sprint iteration cycle very well. If we think about production as a factory assembly line, then the two to four week iteration cycle doesn't make as much sense. Factories don't empty the assembly line every four weeks and determine what to build next.

Assembly lines have things rolling off much more frequently and require incremental improvements instantaneously. The rate that completed assets roll off the line becomes the new heartbeat of the production team.

[...]

However, when we enter production, we can have a long chain of tasks that need to occur before we see some production assets in the game. Take, for example, the steps that need to occur for a single level to appear in the game.

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