Book Notes: Essential Kanban Condensed

Essential Kanban Condensed by David J. Anderson & Andy Carmichael
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a really brief but neat book, although it goes into the Kanban board/cards etc the piece which I felt was a very nice and useful summary was its values, principles etc.

Kanban values

  • Transparency – The belief that sharing information improves the generation of business value.
  • Balance – The understanding that different aspects, viewpoints, and capabilities all must be balanced for effectiveness.
  • Collaboration – The focus on the way people work together.
  • Customer Focus – Knowing the value which the system brings to its users.
  • Flow – The realisation that work is a flow of work leading to value generation, whether continuous or episodic. Improving the flow improves generation of value.
  • Leadership – In Kanban leadership is needed at all levels to achieve value delivery and improvement.
  • Understanding – Kanban is an improvement method, and knowing the starting point is foundation.
  • Agreement – The commitment to move together toward goals, respecting differences of opinion or approach. It is key to note that this is not management by consensus, but a dynamic co-commitment to improvement.
  • Respect – Valuing, understanding, and showing consideration for people.

Agendas

  • The Sustainability Agenda looks inward to the organisation. Its goal is to balance demand with capability thus improving the performance. Where demand outstrips capability making work visible and limiting WiP will have a positive impact on the amount of work completed, the time needed to complete work items, and staff morale.
  • The Service Orientation Agenda focuses attention external to the organisation on performance and customer satisfaction that meet and exceed customers’ needs and expectations.
  • The Survivability Agenda looks into the future and is concerned with staying competitive and adaptive.

Change Management Principles

  • Start with what you are doing now
  • Agree to purse improvement through evolutionary change
  • Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Service Delivery Principles

  • Understand and focus on customer needs and expectations
  • Manage the work let people self organise around it
  • Evolve policies to improve outcomes

General Practices of Kanban

  • Visualise.
  • Limit work in progress.
  • Manage flow.
  • Make policies explicit.
  • Implement feedback loops.
  • Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.