Best Kanban Books to Visualize Your Workflow and Minimize Waste

best kanban books

Kanban is the best organization and productivity mapping tool that shows us how our work works. The two principles of personal Kanban are visualizing your work and limit your work in progress.

Kanban provides the ability to change course quickly in case of change of market condition. Here you will get some of the best Kanban books.

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life
Author: Jim Benson,Tonianne DeMaria Barry
Published at: 02/02/2011
ISBN: 1453802266

Choose the right work at the right time

The best organization and productivity mapping tool that can be mold into whatever shape or form the work best for you at the time. It is scalable that can work with just you, or with your family, or even with workgroups. Personal Kanban is adaptable to all ages and situations. It is also accessible to all learning styles.

Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow and limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices.

Two rules of Personal Kanban are

  • Visualize your work and
  • Limit your work in progress.



Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
Author: David J. Anderson
Published at: 07/04/2010
ISBN: 0984521402

After reading this Kanban book you will be able to know how to visualize the workflow, limit work in progress, measure and manage flow, make progress policies explicit, use models to recognize improvement opportunities and so on. This book is for your technology business.

The four parts of this book are

  • Introduction
  • Benefits of Kanban
  • Implementing Kanban
  • Making improvements

After reading this book, you will find all the answers to your questions that arise in your mind

  • What is Kanban?
  • Why would you want to use Kanban?
  • How do you go about implementing Kanban?
  • How do recognize improvement opportunities and what should I do about them?


Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact
Author: Mike Burrows
Published at: 01/09/2014
ISBN: 0985305193

This Kanban book is very informative for those who want to know about the Kanban method. It is full of examples that help organizations work better for their people, their customers, and other stakeholders. This book also introduces Kanban's three Agendas and the Kanban Lens.

Kanban method can be explained through nine values

  • Transparency
  • Balance
  • Collaboration
  • Customer focus
  • Flow
  • Leadership
  • Understanding
  • Agreement
  • Respect.


Kanban: Visualize work and maximize efficiency- Your guide to the basics
Author: Gary Metcalfe
Published at: 06/10/2018
ISBN: B07J42JP8T

If you want to visualize your work, beat the competition and achieve maximum efficiency then this book is for you. It will teach you how to enhance your results and minimize waste.

After reading this book you'll know about Kanban boards and card, the 2 bin system, scaling, comparisons to other workflow methods, Kanban in your personal life, Kanban in school and at home

It will give you

  • A complete picture of Kanban
  • How to implement Kanban
  • The idea to overcome missed deadlines, communication gaps, product inconsistency, lack of productivity, rigid frameworks, etc.
  • The knowledge to implement Kanban in your existing organization to ensure minimal disruption.

This book will help you to coordinate Kanban into your life, how you can utilize it in various aspects of your life.



Kanban in Action
Author: Marcus Hammarberg,Joakim Sunden
Published at: 17/03/2014
ISBN: 1617291056
This book is divided into three parts including learning Kanban, understanding Kanban and advanced Kanban. It also includes many important topics like Kanban principles, visualizing work, work items, work in process, managing flow, classes of service, planning and estimating, process improvement and so on.

You'll learn from the Kanban in Action
  • Why Kanban works
  • How to use different color stickies on a kanban board to help you organize and track your work items
  • How to focus on work in process and finish faster
  • How team members can make informed decisions.

The book covers techniques for

  • Planning and forecasting
  • Establishing meaningful metrics
  • Visualizing queues and bottlenecks
  • Constructing and using a kanban board
  • Successful Implementations.


Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both (Enterprise Software Development)
Author: Henrik Kniberg
Published at: 01/03/2010
ISBN: 0557138329

This book is divided into two parts. The first part illustrates the similarities and differences between Kanban and Scrum for understanding the thing.

Part two includes a case study

  • The nature of technical operations
  • Why on earth change?
  • Where do we start?
  • Getting going
  • Starting up the teams
  • Addressing stakeholders
  • Constructing the first board
  • Setting the first work in progress limit
  • Honoring the WIP limit
  • Which tasks get on the board?
  • How to estimate?
  • So how did we work
  • Finding a planning concept that worked
  • What to measure?
  • How things started to change
  • General lessons learned

It also includes practical examples and pitfalls, cartoons and diagrams illustrating the day-to-day world.



Agile Project Management with Kanban (Developer Best Practices)
Author: Eric Brechner
Published at: 26/03/2015
ISBN: 0735698953

Agile Project Management with Kanban can help you to achieve your goal. You can use Kanban techniques to start delivering continuous value with your current team and project, master five quick steps for completing work backlogs, plan and staff new projects more effectively, minimize work in progress and quickly adjust to change, eliminate artificial meetings and prolonged stabilization, drive quality upstream, etc. It covers all the basics that are the real resource for all the leaders in the organization.




Kanban Maturity Model: Evolving Fit-For-Purpose Organizations
Author: David J Anderson,Teodora Bozheva
Published at: 26/03/2018
ISBN: 0985305150

The Kanban Maturity Model is a new, powerful tool for coaches and consultants advising medium which describes a roadmap and concrete actions that enable organizations to achieve fitness-for-purpose and exceptional business agility. 

For whom this book is for

  • Consultants
  • Coaches
  • Corporate change agents
  • Managers who must lead medium- and large-scale enterprises.

This book covers

  • Understanding the seven Kanban maturity levels
  • Benefits of the KMM
  • The KMM Architecture and in-depth understanding of the model
  • 132 specific practices against the six general practices of the Kanban Method 
  • seven maturity levels, describing the intent, value, and expected outcomes from each practice.


Banking on Kanban: Mastering Kanban to Boost Cash Flow, Minimize Inventory, and Maximize Delivery Performance
Author: Josette Russell
Published at: 15/07/2016
ISBN: 0997494166
Kanban is one of the best tools for managing inventory. It includes an in-depth explanation of a kanban replenishment system, formulas for even the most complex kanban scenarios, safety stock to address supply/demand fluctuations, dozens of chapter-end tutorials to ensure full comprehension and successful deployment

Kanban can help

  • A manufacturing manager trying to balance delivery and inventory performance
  • A university or training firm seeking a definitive resource on the subject
  • Lean or Operations/Manufacturing consultant seeking a go-to reference



Essential Kanban Condensed
Author: David J Anderson,Andy Carmichael
Published at: 09/05/2016
ISBN: 0984521429

Essential Kanban Condensed is a small book for your essential needs that covers the design, management, and improvement of flow systems for knowledge work. It expands the number of applications of Kanban for evolutionary change and improvement in business agility.

Important topics are

  • Kanban agendas
  • The foundational principles  
    of Kanban
  • Change management principles
  • Service delivery principles
  • Describing flow systems
  • Little’s law
  • The general practices of Kanban
  • Visualize
  • Limit work in progress
  • Manage flow
  • Make policies explicit
  • Implement feedback loops
  • Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally
  • Introducing Kanban to organizations
  • Systems thinking approach to Introducing Kanban (STATIK).


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