Book - Lean from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg

book

A great story by Henrik Kniberg for all of us wondering how organizations becomes Agile. You will not find recipes, golden rules… just a real project for Swedish police and learning items.

Key takeaways

  • Agile/Scrum/Kanban is just a direction. Find your path, find what fits your team. Experiment with the process.
  • Physical Kanban board over digital In the beginning things change often. It’s easy to do it on a wall, it’s difficult to change things in Jira
  • Testing is not only testers responsibility The whole team is responsible for the final quality.
  • Know high level goal Make sure your team understands it. Put it on a wall.
  • Ready for development Define when devs can start coding and when a feature is considered as ready for test.
  • Run process improvement workshops Involve people and let them decide what needs to be improved.
  • Use Lean A3 cause-effect diagram when you want to explain a problem to others. Find a root-case.
  • Collect process metrics There is no golden rule. Story points are great, but not always.
  • Avoid buzzwords Be flexible, rename things as your team wishes. Ex. stand-ups - daily coctail party :)
  • Many, many more

Links

  • Lean from the Trenches: https://pragprog.com/book/hklean/lean-from-the-trenches
  • First version (blog post): https://www.crisp.se/file-uploads/Lean-from-the-trenches.pdf
  • Cause-Effect diagram: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1405468&seqNum=2

I'm Valdas Maksimavicius. I write about data, cloud technologies and personal development. You can find more about me here.