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| Criterion |  Delivery Value Stream Mapping |  Agile Affinity Estimation |  Engineering Kanban |  Agile Bucket System |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When delivery work dissolves into wait times, handoffs, and hidden effort, Value Stream Mapping makes the actual flow visible. The method exposes bottlenecks, idle time, and feedback loops so lead time and improvement levers become tangible. | When many tasks need to be classified quickly, it sorts them by perceived effort and similarity. It reduces the effort of fine-grained estimation for large volumes. | When work sits in too many parallel streams, throughput suffers and no one sees the bottlenecks. Kanban makes the flow of work visible and limits overload so a system becomes calmer and more predictable. | When a large batch of work needs a fast, rough estimate, it sorts items into predefined size buckets. It sorts work by value, risk, and delivery ability. The result is captured as a Bucketed Backlog, Relative Estimates, and Split Candidates. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-3 h | 30-90 min | Ongoing | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 4-10 | 3-12 | 2-12 | 3-12 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Current-state map, Future-state map, Bottleneck list | Affinity Size Map, Grouped Estimates, Unclear Items | Kanban board, WIP policies, Flow metrics | Bucketed Backlog, Relative Estimates, Split Candidates |
Tagsno overlap | LeanFlowWasteDelivery | EstimationBacklogRelative sizing | FlowVisual managementDelivery | EstimationBacklogRelative sizing |