Combining Kanban and Scrum -- Lessons from a Team of Sysadmins

In 2010 the author had an opportunity to work with a team of fantastically intelligent system administrators. Their team dynamics and project was completely different from software projects the author have worked with before. We have tried Scrum which did not work at all due to too unstable environment. We also failed using Kanban because of the lack of boundaries, which led to coming back to guerilla-style work. Over time we have learnt that it is advised to draw as much as you can from Scrum into Kanban to make it easy and sustainable for long. The team came up with a Scrum and Kanban hybrid which is suitable for teams with high level of maintenance and ad-hoc work.