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| Criterion |  Delivery Value Stream Mapping |  Agile Bucket System |  Engineering Kanban |  Agile Affinity Estimation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 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. | 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 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. |
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 | Bucketed Backlog, Relative Estimates, Split Candidates | Kanban board, WIP policies, Flow metrics | Affinity Size Map, Grouped Estimates, Unclear Items |
Tagsno overlap | LeanFlowWasteDelivery | EstimationBacklogRelative sizing | FlowVisual managementDelivery | EstimationBacklogRelative sizing |