Kanban
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business (the “Blue Book”) – David Anderson - The original treatise on the Kanban Method. New, expanded edition coming later in 2018.
Lessons in Agile Management: On the Road to Kanban - David Anderson - some really amazing thoughts coming from the Kanban Method originator and protagonist.
Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility - Klaus Leopold - yes, a slightly provocative title, and now he has you reading about the case study that could be your company! It's a wonderful format to read and he consolidates most of the key points from his below two books. Essential reading for anyone doing this Lean Agile thing.
Practical Kanban – Klaus Leopold - Klaus' book moves toward the practicality that is inherent in Kanban, but often misunderstood.
Essential Kanban Condensed: David Anderson, Andy Carmichael – free quickstart reading on Kanban
Real-World Kanban: Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking - Mattias Skarin - more Kanban designs
Agile Project Management with Kanban - Eric Brechner -
Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life - Tonianne DeMaria Barry, Jim Benson - wonderful explanation of the power and simplicity of Kanban as a life-work device.
Kanban Change Leadership: Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement - Klaus Leopold, Siegfried Kaltenecker - excellent explanation and development of Kanban ideas and reality.
Kanban Maturity Model – David Anderson, Teodora Bozheva - new and expanded model exploration of understanding Kanban evolution and maturity. Download some free stuff from the main KMM site including ebooks and large format posters of different perspectives of the model.
Essential Upstream Kanban - Patrick Steyaert - what to do about the work and product/service development that happens before you start your delivery and release journey.
Okaloa Flowlab - more advanced kanban simulation exploring the other, important areas of the ideas-to-release continuum.
getKanban game - excellent simulation of Kanban using appdev/technology board. Introduces important situational learnings applicable to all Kanban.
Featureban kanban simulation - cost-effective kanban game
Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban - Henrik Kniberg - more fun with Henrik...here exploring big projects and how to approach scaling challenges with Kanban.
Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact - Mike Burrows, Luke Hohmann - Kanban values, principles, etc. looking inside out.
Product and Service Competency
This section is a combination of Product and Service competencies. Product Development/Ideation/Innovation approaches, Product and Process Development lifecycle and finally Product Ownership competency.
Product Development/Ideation/Innovation
Most interesting approach to me is Jobs to be Done (JTBD) – which is a product innovation approach that shapes a product by asking - what jobs is the customer hiring this product for? It is a very focused and systematic process…but realizes and develops far better products than simply guessing.
Most public JTBD discussion is in the book Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, et.al.
The most pragmatic and actionable JTBD implementation guides are:
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Jim Kalbach's The Jobs to be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
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and Alan Kelement's When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy
Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers – David Anderson, Alexei Zheglov - Kanban thought leaders discussions on product and service necessities for organizational survival.
The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development – Donald Reinertsen - quite technical and tough to read, full of absolutely essential ideas.
Design Sprints – book Sprint describes it, a cadenced method of testing ideas in 5 days.
Human Centered Design and Design Thinking - a creative approach to problem solving and the backbone of work from IDEO - a prominent international idea and design firm.
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown - great overview by one of IDEO founders
Discover to Deliver – Ellen Gottesdiener – talks through product discovery approach – free pdf book on her website
Product and Process Development
Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age - Roman Pichler
Lean Startup - Eric Ries - Lean Startup – how do you structure a company process to survive as a startup? Includes product development using customer feedback loops, but also startup management concepts. It’s actually where term MVP came from. Check out the lean startup site.
Essential Upstream Kanban - Patrick Steyaert - free book if you give some info. Discusses what to do about the work and product/service development that happens before you start your delivery and release journey.
The Lean Machine: How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line Growth and Profitability with Revolutionary Lean Product Development - Dantar Oosterwal - great story on product comeback.
Designing the Future: How Ford, Toyota, and other World-Class Organizations Use Lean Product Development to Drive Innovation and Transform Their Business - James Morgan, Jeff Liker
Lean Product and Process Development – Allen Ward
Product Ownership
Scrum Product Ownership: Navigating The Forest and The Trees - Bob Galen - This is his 3rd edition. The 1st had a lot of key insights in Scrum's contribution to Product roles and competencies. I'm sure this will be even better.
Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership - Geoff Watts - sticking with his role improvement theme, a wonderful sequel to his Scrum Mastery.
Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love – Roman Pichlar - Roman's perspective has a lot of great points.
Lean-Agile Coaching
Agile Coaching
Agile coaching framework – Agile Coaching Institute’s competency and domain framework serves as a True North for anyone wanting to move beyond good coaching to great coaching!
Coaching Agile Teams – Lyssa Adkins - if you can't attend a bootcamp or competency courses offered by ACI, this gives you basic guidance
InspireMe! card deck – Lyssa Adkins - inspirational cards and exercises to brighten your day and reinforce key attitudinal coaching stances
Agile Coaching - Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley - more focused on how to help teams implement Agile practices effectively
Co-Active Coaching, 3th Edition: Changing Business, Transforming Lives - Karen Kimsey House, et. al.: - seminal work on coaching as a partnering competency
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, 2nd Ed - Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny - I remember attending a McGraw Hill book launch presentation for their 1st edition. A little long, but good to get some things for those inevitable gnarly talks.
Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior, 2nd Ed - Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny - Followup to previous resource. I actually liked the original title "Crucial Confrontations" a little more. Some ways to deal with the consequences of not having Crucial Conversations initially.
The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully – Gerald Weinberg - key things to understand that will make your coaching life more fulfilling and successful
Facilitating with Ease: Core Skills for Facilitators, Team Leaders and Members, Managers, Consultants, and Trainers, 4th Ed - Ingrid Bens - the classic on facilitation skills
Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Jean Tabaka - great book to help understand how to develop better collaborative dynamics both within and around your teams.
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great - Esther Derby, Diana Larsen - Retros are essential meetings for Lean-Agile. Find out ways to keep purposeful, fresh, unboring by reading this book and research the volumes of approaches that the community has developed.
Training from the Back of the Room - Sharon Bowman - want to break free from your "Death by Powerpoint?" tired of being the "Sage on Stage?" Want your attendees to be engaged and actually learn something? Work through this book or better yet, try the 2-day class!
Organizational Agility
The Servant as Leader – Robert Greenleaf - original classic essay on Servant Leadership
The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of the Business Narrative – Steve Denning - interesting discussion about how to use storytelling as a way to convey ideas and introduce change.
A Higher Standard of Leadership: Lessons from the Life of Gandhi – Keshavan Nair - draw some learnings from a master leader
The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power – Christopher Avery
Leadership and Self-Deception - The Arbinger Institute:
Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders, Jurgen Appelo
Agile Metrics
How do you know where you are going? where you are now? when you will get there? is there a better way?
Metrics describe and give you insight into your value producing journey, your work. They may at first seem overwhelming, over-your-head, arcane. But with repeated advances, they become more and more meaningful and start making things both better and easier. The main obstacle to their use is having a way to produce metrics that closely ties to your work. Sorry, you won't get be able to get especially useful metrics directly out of Jira. The good news is all the better Kanban products (below) have a great set of metrics already built in. And actually Scrum benefits tremendously from the basic Kanban flow metrics as well. A number of vendors (see below) also have Jira plugins or integrations that will help you avoid tearing your hair out.
Two starting points:
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I put together a very short glance of "Actionable Agile Metrics" (yes, borrowed title from Dan's book below) for a local Agile Princeton Meetup lightning talk
Dan Vacanti's two books below helped me establish a solid foundation:
- Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction
- When Will It Be Done?: Lean-Agile Forecasting to Answer Your Customers' Most Important
Question
Troy McGennis' Focused Objective site provides a lot of simple resources and great ideas about metrics.
The Kanban platform vendors' website provide blogs and illustrations of the metrics they use:
- Digite - Swift Kanban
Jira plugins and integrations:
- Digite - Swiftly
Leadership
The Servant as Leader – Robert Greenleaf - original classic essay on Servant Leadership
The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of the Business Narrative – Steve Denning - interesting discussion about how to use storytelling as a way to convey ideas and introduce change.
A Higher Standard of Leadership: Lessons from the Life of Gandhi – Keshavan Nair - draw some learnings from a master leader
The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power – Christopher Avery
Leadership and Self-Deception - The Arbinger Institute:
Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders, Jurgen Appelo