Having been a contractor for many years prior to my current position, I have experienced working practices at different client sites that have varied from pure waterfall to mostly Agile. In my current position, I am working as part of a distributed team (UK, USA, Australia) using a number of Agile practices, including both Scrum and Kanban.
With that background, I found "Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban" an interesting and useful read. It spurred me on to do some things that fall within my remit (e.g. highlighting the "top 5 recurring bugs"), and it reminded me to draw up some cause-effect diagrams (a technique I have used intermittently for years but without knowing it had a name). It also covered things such as the stable-trunk pattern, the importance of a clear definition of Done (or "ready for system test"), and regular process-improvement meetings (retrospectives) that seem so obvious, but which many teams do not implement. However, for me, the key thing that I gained from this book was the importance of a "work in progress" limit at each point on the project board. One hazard of having experience of working at every point in the SDLC is that so many people call on you to do things, which without a "work in progress" limit eventually becomes unsustainable. Again, this is something I had worked out for myself already, but the idea of formalising a "work in progress" limit across the project board is definitely one of those "of course, why didn't I think of that?" moments.
Whilst the emphasis is on Kanban, this book does talk about Scrum, XP etc. I wonder if it's a book that is more useful if you have already been working in a Lean/Agile environment for a while, but I think it would be useful even if you haven't. For those who are new to Lean/Agile, it may be worth reading Part II before Part I, in order to understand the techniques before seeing how they are used in practice.
Relatively short (always good), easy to read, and very useful. Highly recommended.
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![Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban by [Henrik Kniberg]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41MPhjJkL3L._SX260_.jpg)
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Jsh
One of those books that everybody on a project should read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 August 2013Verified Purchase
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Good refresher plus useful tips
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Kirk Stevens
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Zedenne
Most definitely worth a read if you're involved in any sort of Agile project.
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