‘Kanban in Action’ by Hammarberg & Sundén

Who should read this book?

People who want to implement Kanban in their team.

Why you should read this book (or not)?

‘Kanban in Action’ is a relatively easy-to-read book on the topic, allowing you to get started with implementing Kanban in your team. You don’t really need any background to understand it.

You should read it when you are convinced Kanban is probably a good fit for your team (that is probably the most challenging part).

Reading it when I was doing my first Kanban implementation was very helpful. That said, I prefer a little more context and more background behind the principles. You won’t fully understand the Kanban (or “Flow”) mindset by reading just this book.

Compared to ‘Kanban‘ by David J. Anderson, this book is easier to read as it is more hands-on. The downside is that it has less depth and background.

Interesting extracts

“Stop Starting and Start Finishing. How?

1. Rather than starting a new work item, you could help someone on the team finish one already in progress.
2. Rather than allowing yourself to be blocked, for example, by waiting for information or a review from someone, you should try to resolve the situation or work on how to avoid it in the future
3. Make a conscious effort to design the work so that it’s easier to help each other finish it.
4. Use visualisation to make the limits explicit and specific. We choose a maximum number of work items that we are allowed to have in progress at the same time.”

“The reason many people use pictures, cartoons, or drawings of themselves is because it’s easier to identify a person using pattern matching. It creates an instant connection if you compare an image to a person, as opposed to looking at a scribbled name or signature that might need some translation to read and then to associate with the right face.”

“Optimizing for flow is a strategic decision. That decision is a trade-off; to achieve better flow, you might end up with people sitting idle from time to time. (…) There are types of work and situations for which the opposite is true: you strive to use your resources optimally instead. One example is a mill for aluminium? (…) It is expensive to turn off the mill. You want the melting furnace to be running all the time. (…) A fire department has a lot of slack (waiting, preparing and training) i order to be ready to go immediately and put out a fire when it happens. We, as a society, accept that and are paying fire fighters to sit idle, because we don’t want them busy when we call and ask them to put out a fire. (…) In the book “This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox, Niklas Modig and Pär Ahlström define Lean as an operations strategy that aims to increase resources efficiency through focusing on increasing flow efficiency. (…) Reducing waiting time.”

“A kanban team tends to focus on the work on the board rather than on the individual people in the team. (…) Asking the 3 questions is a good practice that makes everyone talk at the meeting, and you get a great status overview for each person in the team. But you might miss the opportunity to talk about the work at hand. Maybe there’s one item that’s blocked, and it could be worth spending the entire meeting talking about how to clear it up. Or maybe nothing is blocked, and work is flowing along as expected; then you can close the meeting early and not drag it out more than needed. (…) The focus isn’t on what individual people have or haven’t done but rather on whether there are any problems in the flow. (…) Kanban teams often enumerate their work from right to left, starting from the Done column and moving upstream. This is to emphasise the pull principle.”

“Iterations and timeboxes encourage you to trim the tail of how much work you can squeeze into the iteration. This can be helpful and beneficial because it may nudge you into splitting big work items in two and pushing the second part to the next iteration. When you are done with the first part of the work item, you may find that the second part wasn’t really needed. When you, in a flow-based process, focus on individual items, you are instead trimming oof the tail of each story in the same way. You might move an advanced feature (like a nice drop-down box for selection for example) into a work item of its own and use a text box with the numerical value instead. And lo and behold – perhaps, your users are advanced enough that they like entering the numerical value better, and it turns out to be even quicker for them.”