This wonderful little book is a gentle introduction to Kanban by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sunden. It explains the theory behind flow-based processes and provides a ton of practical implementation tips on everything from visualising work to how to properly take out a sticky note.
The first part deals with the basic principles of Kanban, using visual boards to show and manage work in progress, managing queues and bottlenecks and distributing and limiting work across team members. The second part explains how to manage continuous process improvement, how to deal with estimation and planning and how to define and implement different classes of service.
My impression is that this book will be most useful to people completely new to Kanban, who are investigating the concepts or starting to adopt this process. If you already use Kanban, you might find the chapters on managing bottlenecks and process metrics interesting.
Compared to David Anderson’s book, Kanban in Action is more approachable for beginners. Each important concept is described with lots of small, concrete examples, which will help readers new to Kanban put things into perspective, but also reinforce the message that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Anderson’s book goes in more depth to explain the theory behind the practice, and this book has more practical information and concrete advice on topics such as setting work in progress limits, managing different types of items on a visualisation board and choosing workflow metrics. If you’re researching this topic or starting to implement Kanban, it’s worth reading both books.
