Business, Projects and Management
Agile, Scrum and Kanban
Agile began as a statement of values by software developers and grew into the default way most digital teams organise their work. Scrum is its most widely used framework, a free guide of barely a dozen pages that says who is accountable for what, which meetings recur and what the team keeps visible. Kanban grew from a different root and manages flow instead of iterations. This page separates what each one requires from the rituals that have grown up around them.
Why this topic exists: Three accountabilities, five events, three artefacts and the empirical pillars of the 2020 Scrum Guide; Kanban's flow; the PSM and PSPO exams and PMP's agile half.
Agile is a family of approaches, not a method. What they share is a bet that for complex work, plans improve faster through short cycles of building and showing than through longer analysis up front. Scrum and Kanban are the two frameworks most teams actually run, and they answer the same problem differently: Scrum puts the work into fixed time boxes, while Kanban limits how much is in flight at once and lets items flow through.
| Element of Scrum | What the 2020 guide makes it responsible for |
|---|---|
| Product Owner | The value of the product; orders the product backlog and answers for that order |
| Scrum Master | The team's effectiveness, and Scrum being understood across the wider organisation |
| Developers | Planning the sprint, building the increment, holding each other to the definition of done |
| The sprint | A container lasting a month at most; the next one opens the moment the last closes |
| Planning, Daily Scrum, Review, Retrospective | Set a goal, adjust each day, inspect the result with stakeholders, improve the way of working |
| Product backlog, sprint backlog, increment | The three artefacts, each tied to a commitment: product goal, sprint goal, definition of done |
Underneath sit three empirical pillars, inspection, adaptation and transparency, and five values the guide asks the team to live by: courage, focus, commitment, respect and openness. The guide is deliberately incomplete. It says nothing about story points, velocity charts, user stories or software, and those practices, however common, are optional additions rather than Scrum itself.
Kanban and the scaled frameworks
Kanban asks a team to make its work visible, cap how many items may sit in each column, and manage the flow of items rather than a calendar of iterations. It fits teams whose work lands without warning, such as support or operations, and many teams combine its board and limits with Scrum's events. Kanban prescribes no roles, which makes it easy to start and just as easy to do badly. Scaled frameworks such as SAFe and LeSS address a different problem, dozens of teams on one product. They add roles, planning layers and vocabulary, and they are best learned after one team's practice is understood, never instead of it.
Exams and the beginner's trap
PSM I examines understanding of the guide as written, PSPO I the product side, and both set a pass mark that punishes approximate knowledge. The PMP now draws much of its content from adaptive and hybrid delivery, so a project manager who dismisses agile will struggle with it. The trap for newcomers is learning agile from their first employer. Plenty of organisations run a version with daily status meetings, sprints that stretch when work is late and a scrum master who hands out tasks, and people trained there fail the exams by answering from habit. Read the guide first, then judge your workplace against it.
Next to this topic
- Project management fundamentalsCharter, scope, schedule, cost, risk and stakeholders: the predictive vocabulary of PMBOK 7's performance domains and the PMP ECO's Process domain, tested by CAPM, PMP, PRINCE2 and IPMA.
- Business analysis and requirementsElicitation, requirements life cycle, strategy analysis, solution evaluation: BABOK v3's six knowledge areas, the discipline between the business and the build (SFIA Change analysis).
- Product managementDiscovery, roadmaps, prioritisation, metrics and the product owner's accountability: where business analysis, agile and strategy meet (Scrum Guide's Product Owner; SFIA Product management; PSPO).
- Organisational change and transformationMaking a change stick in an organisation is its own discipline (SFIA Change planning: organisational change management and enablement; PMBOK's stakeholder and uncertainty domains).
- Leadership and people managementRunning a team: delegation, feedback, performance, hiring, motivation (SFIA People management; PMP's People domain; Udemy's largest business shelf).
- Business strategy and planningBusiness models, competitive position, planning and the numbers behind a decision (SFIA Strategic planning; Udemy Strategy; the business model canvas).
- Operations, Lean and Six SigmaProcesses, quality and waste: Lean, Six Sigma's DMAIC and the belts, supply chain and operations management (SFIA Business process improvement; Udemy Operations).
- Entrepreneurship and small businessStarting and running a small business: idea to model, funding, legal basics, first customers (Udemy Entrepreneurship; the site's own small-business and freelance readership).
- Sales and negotiationProspecting, discovery, closing, key accounts and negotiating: the revenue side of every business (Udemy Sales; SFIA Selling).
- Business communication and presentingWriting, presenting, meetings and public speaking: the skill every other business skill is delivered through (Udemy Communication; SFIA Relationships and engagement).
- Freelancing and independent workBriefs, statements of work, day rates, retainers and scope creep: how independent work is scoped, priced and agreed (the site's freelancing concepts and the /freelance/ silo).
Concepts to know
Glossary entries with the reason each one matters here.
- Agile
The mindset the frameworks serve.
- Scrum
The framework most teams start with.
- Sprint
The fixed-length container of the work.
- Product Backlog
The one ordered list of what could be done.
- User Story
How backlog items are written.
- Definition of Done
What finished means.
- Retrospective
How the team improves itself.
- Kanban
Flow instead of sprints.
Certifications that test it
Vendor exams and free certificates; facts, cost and the preparation path are on each page, and the certifications hub has them all.
Tools of the trade
- Jira
Where most backlogs live.
Frequently asked
- Is Scrum the same thing as agile?
- No. Agile is the broader set of values and principles; Scrum is one framework that puts them into practice. A team can work in an agile way with Kanban, Extreme Programming or its own process, and a team can hold every Scrum event without being agile if nothing it builds reaches users.
- Do I need a course before sitting PSM I?
- No course is required, and the assessment is taken online. What it needs is a close reading of the Scrum Guide, more than once, and practice with questions that turn on its exact wording. Experienced practitioners fail it more often than careful readers, because they answer from how their own team works.
- When does Kanban fit better than Scrum?
- When work arrives continuously and cannot wait for the next sprint: support queues, operations, content production. Its limits on work in progress stop such a team from starting everything at once. When a team builds a product towards goals over several weeks, Scrum's rhythm of planning and review usually serves better.
Courses in the directory
361 courses are filed here; the top 6 by our ranking, details and the provider link on each course page.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026 · Getting Digital