Kanban is a flexible management tool that originated from Toyota. Over the past few decades, it has become very popular in the IT industry, alongside other agile methodologies. David Anderson has worked in IT for 30 years and has been an advocate of the Kanban methodology for many years. The title of the book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, suggests that we’ll learn both about the methodology and the best ways to apply it. At least, those were my expectations. Especially since it’s praised by various experts in the annotations.
However, I found the book difficult from the very first pages. I pushed through to the end to form a complete opinion, but it only confirmed my initial thoughts rather than changing them.
Let’s start with the fact that the language of the book is very dry. Yes, it’s not fiction, but there are plenty of management and programming books that are easy and interesting to read. This book is not one of them.
Around the middle of the book, it starts to feel like the author has a complex, as he often mentions the companies he worked for and the projects he was involved in. And he keeps repeating the same thing. It almost feels like self-promotion. Combined with the dryness of the text, it sometimes comes across as “Bored? Well, keep reading because I’m the great KANBAN GURU.” Most chapters begin with, “When I worked there, we…”
It’s also worth mentioning the illustrations. There are quite a few of them, but most are useless. Kanban revolves around task cards. The author explains in detail what should be written on the cards and how. And he provides examples in the form of photos. But almost all of them are distant shots of boards where you can see there are some cards, but not much more. When he says, “Here’s an example of color coding,” and the image is in shades of gray where you can barely distinguish one gray from another… well, it comes across as strange. I thought it was a problem with the Russian version, but it turns out that Western reviewers also noted this oddity.
But alright, maybe I’m nitpicking. The book does have useful examples of Kanban use. However, it’s presented in such a way that it doesn’t make you want to immediately start implementing it. I use Kanban in my work, albeit not to its full potential. I’ve also read other books on the methodology, which were much shorter and far more motivating. This book, on the other hand, feels depressing and doesn’t inspire you to take action.
The most ironic example is when the author mentions that in one company where he actively implemented Kanban, they stopped using it right after he left. If all the managers were so convinced by his ideas and the company’s culture had shifted toward trust due to Kanban, why did everything suddenly change in an instant?
In general, I don’t recommend this book. There are better works on the subject, such as Kanban and Scrum – Making the Most of Both. It’s several times shorter, more straightforward, with clear examples, far less pompous, and even available for free.
My rating: 2/5
