Real-World Kanban: Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking

Your team is stressed; priorities are unclear. You’re not sure what your teammates are working on, and management isn’t helping. If your team is struggling with any of these symptoms, these four case studies will guide you to project success. See how Kanban was used to significantly improve time to market and to create a shared focus across marketing, IT, and operations. Each case study comes with illustrations of the Kanban board and diagrams and graphs to help you see behind the scenes.

Learn a Lean approach by seeing how Kanban made a difference in four real-world situations. You’ll explore how four different teams used Kanban to make paradigm-changing improvements in software development. These teams were struggling with overwork, unclear priorities, and lack of direction. As you discover what worked for them, you’ll understand how to make significant changes in real situations.

The four case studies in this book explain how to:

Improve the full value chain by using Enterprise Kanban

Boost engagement, teamwork, and flow in change management and operations

Save a derailing project with Kanban

Help an office team outside IT keep up with growth using Kanban

What seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. Discover why “improving IT” can make you miss your biggest improvement opportunities, and why you should focus on fixing quality and front-end operations before IT. Discover how to keep long-term focus and improve across department borders while dealing with everyday challenges. Find out what happened when using Kanban to find better ways to do work in a well-established company, including running multi-team development without a project office.

You’ll inspire your team and engage management to make it easier to develop better products.

What You Need:

This is a case study book, so there are no software requirements. The book covers the relevant bits of theory before presenting the case studies.

Table of Contents

Part I. Lean Applied: Four Stories of Improving Using Kanban
Chapter 1. You Hold the Key to Your Future
Chapter 2. Enterprise Kanban: Improve the Full Value Chain
Chapter 3. Kanban in Change Management
Chapter 4. Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project
Chapter 5. Using Kanban in the Back Office: Outside IT

Part II. Appendix
A1. Introducing Concepts