Agile Project Management with Kanban

Eric Brechner

Feb 2015 · Microsoft Press

About this ebook

Use Kanban to maximize efficiency, predictability, quality, and value
With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban.

Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team.

Think of this book as “Kanban in a box”: open it, read the quickstart guide, and you’re up and running fast. As you gain experience, Brechner reveals powerful techniques for right-sizing teams, estimating, meeting deadlines, deploying components and services, adapting or evolving from Scrum or traditional Waterfall, and more.

For every step of your journey, you’ll find pragmatic advice, useful checklists, and actionable lessons. This truly is “Kanban in a box”: all you need to deliver breakthrough value and quality.

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
• Improve and enhance customer engagement
• Visualize workflow and fix revealed bottlenecks
• Drive quality upstream
• Integrate Kanban into large projects
• Optimize sustained engineering (contributed by James Waletzky)
• Expand Kanban beyond software development

Ratings and reviews

Great to understand how Microsoft has transitioned from purely waterfall project methodology, to then include DevOps, Scrum and now Kanban. Also, it was beneficial to understand the lessons they have learnt (implemented) along the journey.

Exactly what I searched for improving our Kanban usages in my company. We introduced Kanban 3 or 4 years ago, but I was not satisfied with the current situation. Now after I have read the book I will be able to optimize on almost every aspect in our processes.

Lightweight manual. Simple and effective. Will get you going with Kanban in no time.

About the author

Eric Brechner is the development manager for Microsoft’s Xbox Engineering Services team. At Microsoft, he has also been development manager for Xbox.com, engineering learning and development, and Office Media Store. He has previously worked at Boeing, Silicon Graphics, Graftek, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The author of a book and blog on software best practices (as I. M. Wright), he holds eight patents and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.