Platform Team Rates Switch From Sprints to Kanban a 'B' After One Year

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A nine-person platform engineering team supporting 36 production services formally abandoned sprint-based planning on 19 August 2025, completing a year-long transition to a Kanban system with strict work-in-progress limits. The team had found that sprints created an illusion of order, with unplanned interruptions — incidents, access requests, urgent deployments — consistently overwhelming planned work while remaining invisible in leadership reports. By adopting Kanban, the team enforced a hard WIP limit of eight active standard tickets plus a dedicated expedite lane for production incidents or imminent security deadlines. The shift changed how engineers prioritized and discussed work, surfacing previously hidden blockers and prompting the team to focus on finishing tasks rather than starting new ones. After 12 months, the team grades the decision a B, crediting the board with greater transparency but acknowledging it introduced new overhead that had not been accounted for in capacity planning.

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