Impact!

Here are some books that I liked recently

Lean from the Trenches

Without doubt, my favourite book of 2012 is Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large Scale Projects with Kanban. I once heard the author speak at Oredev about his papers as an occasional brain-dump, kind of emptying short term memory so that he could learn new things, and this book is a great example of that. Without dogma, buzzwords or marketing, Henrik Kniberg notes lessons learned from a uniquely interesting project, where lean software delivery principles were applied to a large scale public sector effort with great success. I particularly love that there is no preaching, the author does not claim that what worked for them works universally, but tells a great story with deep insights and lets readers make their own conclusions.

I read the book in one go, without putting it down, during a five hour flight. The first part is the case study of the delivery of the Digital Investigation System for the Swedish Police Authority. The second part is a deeper dive into the techniques and tools used to set up and run the delivery process. The book is for experienced practitioners and newbies alike. People new to Kanban and Lean software delivery will benefit from a real-world warts-and-all case study, with a pretty good example of how things were set up. Examples of process metrics, bug handling, setting up a Kanban board across teams and handling technical stories will be particularly interesting to people who had some prior knowledge but haven't seen the techniques work at large. Part II will probably help newbies make a lot more sense out of Part I, so if you are completely new to the topic it might be worth reading the second part first. Practitioners will benefit from some nice insights and ideas spread across the first part of the book, for example imposing work-in-progress limits on bugs, distinguishing between buffer and WIP columns on Kanban boards and setting up a "continuous process improvement engine".

The last point is incredibly important, as continous process improvement is one of the key aspects of successful delivery in my experience. Knibeg nails it with "A great process isn’t designed; it is evolved". Many other authors have written on this topic, but Kniberg's unique contribution with this book is a simple guideline that will help teams put this in place: Clarity, Communication, Data. Kniberg documents how physical boards provide visibility and clarity, how periodic process improvement workshops within a team and across teams communicate ideas and how simple metrics provide data to help a team stay on the right track. The entire chapter 10 is devoted to this topic. In addition to that chapter, my special thanks go to Kniberg for his glossary appendix, where he lists how they avoided the buzzword lingo that turns off so many people. For example, using "Process Improvement Meeting" instead of "Sprint Retrospective".

Five out of five stars, without hesitation. Drop whatever you are reading now and read this one instead.

Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban
Verdict:         
Author: Henrik Kniberg
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 978-1934356852
Pick it up from Amazon UK or Amazon.Com.

Clean Language

No, it's not Uncle Bob's third book in the Clean series, though the title might suggest that. Clean Language by Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees is a book about an interesting communication technique. The book was published in 2008, but I only recently came across it, and it impressed me enough to recommend to my readers.

The central idea of the book is that metaphors are a fundamental tool for organising thoughts and we use them subconciously to make sense of the world, without even being aware of it. Some typical examples of that are temperature used for affection ("They greeted me warmly."), size used for importance ("Tomorrow is a big day."), height used for quantity ("Prices are high."), and purpose represented as a physical object of desire ("I saw an opportunity for success and grabbed it."). Though such simple metaphors should be unversally understood, more complex metaphors can be easily understood by different people in different ways. The authors argue that we can get better understanding and awareness of others' and our own ideas by recognising metaphors, pushing them from subconcious processing into concious analysis, understanding the ties between a metaphor and the real situation and reverse-engineering metaphorical solutions into real ones. For example, the next time you feel stuck while working with a computer program, try thinking about what kind of stuck feeling that really is and what would make you feel unstuck.

Clean Language is an approach to soliciting information and facilitating discussion that recognises this central role of metaphors, helps us spot metaphors in other people's thoughts and our own ideas and makes those connections explicit. The premise of Clean Language is that such concious analysis of metaphors helps understand other people better. One particularly eye-opening aspect of this approach for me was how much my own metaphors and assumptions can cloud my understanding of clients' issues and situation. Clean Language provides a toolkit, through a set of twelve questions, that prevents polluting communication with our own metaphors, hence the title "Clean". Instead of introducing our own metaphors into the mix, Clean Language questions help people improve active listening.

Most of the examples in the book are about psychology, and helping people with psychological issues, but I've been able to translate many of those examples easily into my everyday consulting. Since reading the book, I became a lot more attentive to the way others use metaphors and a lot more careful about driving the conversation with my own metaphors that could be easily misunderstood. This hardly makes it a life-changing experience, but anything that improves communication will surely be a useful toolkit for many people in our industry. Business analysts, team leaders, process improvement coaches and consultants will probably benefit from this book the most.

I give the book four out of five stars. For all the good content, there is a bit too much repetition for my taste in the book. The example discussion sessions sometimes go on forever and I found myself skipping large portions of those parts.

Clean Language:Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds
Verdict:         
Authors: Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
ISBN: 978-1845901257
Pick it up from Amazon UK or Amazon.Com.