Nice article from Karl Scotland on why Kanban isn't just for mature teams. I particularly like his conclusion...

It seems to me that there is in fact a subtle difference between kanban and typical agile processes such as Scrum. Scrum focuses on being agile which may (and should) lead to improving. Kanban focuses on improving, which may lead to being agile. However, being agile itself is not important - it just happens to be the best way we (or at least I) know at the moment. If a team improves in other ways, then its the improvement that's important.

I would go a little further. Kanban is a way of insuring sustainable pace. Sustainable pace generally means that slack exists in the system. Slack generates opportunities for people to think about the process and what hinders overall team performance. It is this that leads to improvements being implemented.

Kanban also creates a process that visibly exposes bottlenecks, waste and variability. Hence, kanban exposes improvement opportunities at the same time as providing a system with slack that allows people to focus on implementing improvements.

As Karl says, agility is a potential outcome. A culture of continuous improvement (kaizen) is the goal. Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Kanban, Lean, Karl+Scotland