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Book Review: Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, by David J. Anderson
This was a very useful book, as it turned out I had significantly misunderstood Kanban (or had it mis-explained to me) as a chaotic free-for-all process. In fact it's all based on managing workflow and limiting (matching) the number of in-progress work items to the resources available. Anderson waxes lyrical about CMMI levels, and it probably does take a higher level of management maturity than I have regularly encountered to "get" Kanban and make it work. The theory is based on the Toyota manufacturing process and expects that by limiting work in progress, any blockage will "stop the line" and consequently result in "swarming" by resources to fix the problem, and that overall this will lead to more consistent and predictable product delivery to customers. Of course in practice not all resources are equal or substitutable for a given problem, and not all customers accept that their requirements are only a fraction of the whole.
This was a very useful book, as it turned out I had significantly misunderstood Kanban (or had it mis-explained to me) as a chaotic free-for-all process. In fact it's all based on managing workflow and limiting (matching) the number of in-progress work items to the resources available. Anderson waxes lyrical about CMMI levels, and it probably does take a higher level of management maturity than I have regularly encountered to "get" Kanban and make it work. The theory is based on the Toyota manufacturing process and expects that by limiting work in progress, any blockage will "stop the line" and consequently result in "swarming" by resources to fix the problem, and that overall this will lead to more consistent and predictable product delivery to customers. Of course in practice not all resources are equal or substitutable for a given problem, and not all customers accept that their requirements are only a fraction of the whole.