Kanban in Action

Do you have more work that needs to be done than you have time to do it? Do you suffer from interruptions and context switching? Would your work benefit from faster feedback and shorter lead times? Are you challenged to find time and guidance for improving your way of working? If you answered yes to any of these questions, kanban is for you!

Kanban is an emerging second generation agile method inspired by five decades of process excellence in the Japanese auto manufacturing industry, also known as lean thinking. Kanban leverages visual management techniques to involve stakeholders and to facilitate understanding of how the work works. Through limiting the amount of work in process, and by focusing on finishing that work as soon as possible, kanban helps you to adjust demand to capacity, to reduce lead times and to create a driver for continuous improvement.

Kanban in Action is a down-to-earth, no-frills, get-to-know-the-ropes introduction to kanban. It's based on the real-world experience and observations from two kanban coaches who have introduced this process to dozens of teams. In this book, you'll discover basic but powerful techniques on how to visualize and track work, how to construct a kanban board, how to visualize queues and bottlenecks, and much much more. You'll learn the principles of why kanban works as well as nitty-gritty details like how to use different color stickies to help you organize and track your work items.