Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible : Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow (Book Review)
This is a concise introduction to Kanban, focusing on the idea that your teams and colleagues need a way to see (with their eyes . . .) work so that it can be planned, discussed, and remove surprises from the organization. I would say that if you're a new practitioner of some kind of agile methodology (Scrum, Kanban, whatever) and want to tune up your work boards, this book could help quite a bit. It is not doctrinaire, and provides a lot of different patterns; no specific software package is discussed, and indeed the book makes a good implicit case for physical boards. The book also knows that not all patterns are for everyone, and contains a judicious chapter called "Beastly Practices" (173-183). where the author rants about some ways that you can shoot yourself in the foot (e.g., Gantt Charts, but perhaps more critically, individually-named swim lanes -- don't do that!).
The book is punctuated with team exercises where you use sticky notes in a variety of ways to level up your teams. The exercises seem a little dull to me, though, compared to what you might find at tastycupcakes.org and other places.
The book has a nice discussion of flow metrics and queuing theory (pp, 141-149), but there is a fatal flaw in this discussion, which is that Little's Law requires that all work be measured in the same units. Good luck with that: I don't think the discussion here is going to provide you with something you can use "out of the box," though the author does recommend Vacanti's Actionable Agile Metrics.
There are some bonuses. Tangential to her main topic is the idea of "Lean Coffee" (pp. 165-168) which is a way to bubble up ideas from a group in a semi-democratic way. We have a large meeting at my company that exposes "red flags" and "green flags" but it has become boring with less utility: An occasional "Lean Coffee" might be just what we need.
Originally reviewed on Goodreads on 25 June 2019.
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