Kanban

Another belated review, this time of a borrowed book. Which I can now finally return! A delay in the review of this book might be a feature if I had actually used it for, as the subtitle puts it, successful evolutionary change in my technology business. Sadly, I haven't, so it's just late.

So, my background: I've done a lot of variations of traditional project management for IT projects (both development and more operational ones), both as a participant and as a project manager. (Although I've never done the latter as a full-time job, and have no desire to do so.) A while back at Stanford, my team adopted Agile, specifically Scrum, so I did a fair bit of research about Scrum including a couple of training courses. Since then, at Dropbox, I've used a few different variations on a vaguely Agile-inspired planning process, although it's not particularly consistent with any one system.

I've been hearing about Kanban for a while and have friends who swear by it, but I only had a vague idea of how it worked. That seemed like a good excuse to read a book.

And Anderson's book is a good one if, like me, you're looking for a basic introduction. It opens with a basic description and definition, talks about motivation and the expected benefits, and then provides a detailed description of Kanban as a system. The tone is on the theory side, written using the terminology of (I presume) management theory and operations management, areas about which I know almost nothing, but the terminology wasn't so heavy as to make the book hard to read. Anderson goes into lots of detail, and I thought he did a good job of distinguishing between basic principles, optional techniques, and variations that may be appropriate for particular environments.

If you're also not familiar, the basic concept of Kanban is to organize work using an in-progress queue. It eschews time-bounded planning entirely in favor of staging work at the start of a sequence of queues and letting the people working on each queue pull from the previous queue when they're ready to take on a new task. As you might guess from that layout, Kanban was originally invented for assembly-line manufacturing (at Toyota). That was one of the problems that I had with it, or at least the presentation in this book: most of my software development doesn't involve finishing one part of something and handing it off to someone else, which made it hard to identify with the pipeline model. Anderson has clearly spent a lot of time working with large-scale programming shops, including outsourced development firms, with dedicated QA and operations roles. This is not at all how Silicon Valley agile development works, so parts of this book felt like missives from a foreign country.

That said, the key point of Kanban is not the assembly line but the work limit. One of the defining characteristics of Kanban, at least as Anderson presents it, is that one does not try to estimate work and tile it based on estimates, not even to the extent that Scrum and other Agile methodologies do within the sprint. Instead, each person takes as long as they take on the things they're working on, and pulls a new task when they have free capacity. The system instead puts a limit on how many things they can have in progress at a time. The problem of pipeline stalls is dealt with both via continuous improvement and "swarming" of a problem to unblock the line (since other teams may not be able to work until the block is fixed), and with being careful about the sizing of work items (I'm used to calling them stories) that go in the front end.

Predictability, which Scrum uses story sizing and team velocity analysis to try to achieve, is basically statistical. One uses a small number of buckets of sizes of stories, and the whole pipeline will finish some number of work items per unit time, with a variance. The promise made to clients and other teams is that some percentage of the work items will be finished within some time frame from when they enter the system. Most importantly, these are all descriptive properties, determined statistically after the fact, rather than planned properties worked out through story sizing and extensive team discussion. If you, like me, are pretty thoroughly sick of two-hour sprint planning meetings and endless sizing exercises, this is rather appealing.

My problem with most work planning systems is that I think they overplan and put too much weight our ability to estimate how long work will take. Kanban is very appealing when viewed through that lens: it gives up on things we're bad at in favor of simple measurement and building a system with enough slack that it can handle work of various different sizes. As mentioned at the top, I haven't had a chance to try it (and I'm not sure it's a good fit with the inter-group planning methods in use at my current workplace), but I came away from this book wanting to do so.

If, like me, your experience is mostly with small combined teams or individual programming work, Anderson's examples may seem rather large, rather formal, and bureaucratic. But this is a solid introduction and well worth reading if your only experience with Agile is sprint planning, story writing and sizing, and fast iterations.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2015-08-31