Book Review: Kanban

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson is recommended reading if you are interested in evolutionary improvement of software development. Part 1 of the book gives an introduction to Kanban. Part 2 explains the fundamentals such as limiting work in progress and continuous improvements. Part 3 goes in depth with implementation details. Part 4 explores more advanced topics such as issue management and sources of variability. The first implementation of Kanban was with a TSP team, which is particularly interesting to me since I know TSP very well. I cannot avoid the thought that maybe David was lucky running into such a team for his first implementation, because a TSP team has a very well-defined process? I have seen attempts to implement Kanban for other teams, and they have failed. These teams achieved some improvements for sure, but what they ended up with was not Kanban. I also found it interesting that there is a limit to how much improvement you can achieve in the team itself. Sooner or later you need to address the team’s environment. What I find a bit tragic though, is that the TSP team could not improve its own performance without management intervention.