Great e-book on Agile Kanban

February 1, 2010

One of the great things about developers is that they never stop experimenting with new practices. I have heard more about development teams using Kanban recently and just came across an e-book on the topic that you can get from InfoQ here. The simple principle is to limit work in process and it can be used in combination with any other development or management practice…it is a great principle, as it helps to enforce focus on the few things that matter at any point in time.

The e-book has a good demonstration on how you can use Kanban without using Scrum or how you could combine Kanban into Scrum. It has some great ideas and is worth a read if you are into experimenting with new techniques to improve your product lifecycle management solutions (I hope you are).

While the book is aimed at development processes, the ideas in the book also apply really nicely to other processes, such as sales (might be useful to consider before you do a salesforce implementation), customer service, financial processes, and recruiting support, as Kanban is an area of lean, which was first used for manufacturing processes and has been spreading over the last decade into service processes.

InfoQ also has an older, but just as relevant e-book on Scrum and XP, that is a really useful read if you are just getting started with Agile principles and practices. It helps give you a step-by-step real world guide to the practices of Scrum and XP.

Btw, to get both books, you do have to go through a heavyweight sign-in process, but the minute or two that it takes are well worth the value of the books.

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As the founder of OpenView, Scott focuses on distinctive business models and products that uniquely address a meaningful market pain point. This includes a broad interest in application and infrastructure companies, and businesses that are addressing the next generation of technology, including SaaS, cloud computing, mobile platforms, storage, networking, IT tools, and development tools.