I was introduced to agile via Scrum and started to use it, guerilla-style, at a large insurance company in Sweden. Before long, it spread; and within a few years the company had more than 50 Scrum teams. But it still didn’t feel right, because the work processes for many teams weren’t a good fit with the start-stop nature of Scrum. Also, most teams didn’t span the entire process; the teams mostly consisted of developers who were handed requirements and who then delivered to a separate testing phase. I felt the itch to try to incorporate more of the complete process that the work went through.
This itch led me to start investigating other practices in the agile community. Before long, and through some helpful pointers from Joakim, I found and started to read up on kanban. In 2010 and 2011, I attended trainings on kanban and kanban coaching given by David J. Anderson. These further confirmed my feeling that kanban and Lean were what I had been looking for.