Agile Project Management with Kanban (Developer Best Practices)

Agile Project Management with Kanban by Eric Brechner is very different from the last two books about Kanban I have had an opportunity to read recently (Kanban in Action and Kanban from the Inside). It is about good, old and infamous Project Management, something, what many Agile or Lean orthodox people call bad and dead. It briefly presents precise and actionable ways how to apply Kanban as a tool for organizations of different kind and size. Despite being written by a guy who worked for a huge product development organization (Xbox/Microsoft), the book manages to escape insanely popular trend of telling how to scale Kanban, just as consulting business suggests to scale Scrum or Agile. Instead it meets the reality of any software or product development teams, which do not work independently. It comes with an open letter to upper management, which needs to support evolution toward Kanban, as well as with questions and more important answers you may need to convince your peers, working with Waterfall or Scrum in the past.You won't find here too many details about theories behind Lean and Kanban, but just enough to know where to look for it and why things work better this way. The author, moreover, offers ready-to-use Excel sheets, to calculate just a few, but super important numbers and metrics for your team, so you can track some KPIs and improve based on real data, not just your gut feeling. In the end there’s a big chance your gut feelings will be consistent with data trends, and Kanban will guide you to better predictability, less waste and rework, more evenness and joy of work.

Great for starting out with Kanban. Had useful info on how to determine WIP limits. I reference it a lot as my job as a Scrum Master, doing Scrumban.

I particularly liked how this book compares the advantages of Kanban over Scrums iterations. Good food for thought. The book is well laid out and goes directly to the most relevant topics. There’s little “fluff” in this book 👌🏽.

Wow. Just brilliant advice with practical steps and guidance to help someone improve their workflow and processes. No wasted words or filler. Just the meat and potatoes. I highly recommended this book!

A good basic information how to use kanban in project management. Lots of theory but could have more information how to use it in a project, which includes many subprojects. We had to figure it out by our self..

Decent basic info - useful for someone new to Lean, but still retains traditional project management bias. Misses the importance of Kaizen and the 100 years of lessons learned before software people "discovered" Lean

We had a supposed (certified) scrum master where I worked last but being my first experience with it, I was shocked how unproductive our processes were. After learning what scrum was supposed to be like, I realized how saying you practice scrum and doing scrum are two different things. Our bug tracking software (Fogbugz) included a Kanban board which got me interested in researching the subject which ultimately led to this wonderful book. After reading it, I have to admit I think this is going to be better than scrum. Can't wait to try it out. This book is highly recommended!

The book covers the basics and attempts to provide guidance for the move the the new methodology. It is easy to read, the writing enthusiastic and interesting examples are littered throughout the book. It doesn't try to be the single source of all knowledge for Kanban, but offers up recommendations if more detailes are needed, which I personally find refreshing.If you are looking for a good introduction to the Kanban method, you have found the right book!