"Personal Kanban" Book Writeup
June 09, 2011
What’s the point? The book focuses on the how and why of using Kanban in both personal and team-oriented settings. It lays out the fundamentals of creating a Kanban board and then digs into the reason why concepts like limiting WIP and visualizing tasks are important.
How was it? I went searching for a book on Kanban in software engineering after being unable to explain to someone why using Kanban was so great. I know the how because I have used Kanban on every project I have worked on at SEP, but I didn’t have a really good grasp of the why.
The book takes a stance against one size fits all productivity solutions and shows how flexible Kanban can be by given examples from non-software applications (moving houses, college finance planning). I will probably give a personal Kanban a try since my current system of Todo lists in a text file could use improvement.
I also liked the description of kaizen; it is definitely something that I strive for and this was a good
reminder to always try to be improving your process.
Who should read it? I directly recommended it to a family member who works at a very deadline-driven, high pressure software company and I think that that anyone who is unhappy with how their projects are being run could take some advice from it. If you use Kanban but want to dig into the philosophy behind it, this book is a solid resource.