Management Books

• The New Economics: For Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming
  Second Edition (reprint). The best of Deming's books for learning about his system for management. Packed with great thoughts but not as easy to read as the best books. This is a great book, but often it is best for managers already committed to finding new ideas.

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David Anderson
  The book provides specific and useful guidance to those attempting to adopt kanban management in software development. The books is very well written and presents the material in a very easy to digest manner. It is so packed with information it is very difficult to mine even a significant portion of the value in one read. The organization allows for easy reference as you need to focus on any specific topic to find that topic and get an excellent review in minutes.

• Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability by John Hunter
  The book provides an overview for viewing management as a system. It is largely based on those of Dr. Deming, along with natural outgrowths or extensions of his ideas such as lean manufacturing and agile software development. To achieve great results there must be a continual focus on achieving results today and building enterprise capacity to maximize results over the long term. Managers have many management concepts, pactices and tools available to help them in this quest. The challenge is to create and continually build and improve a management system for the enterprise that leads to success. The book provides a framework for management thinking. With this framework the practices and tools can be applied to build enterprise capacity and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
  

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Ron Moen, Thomas Nolan, Cliff Norman, Lloyd Provost
  Second edition of this great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement. Highly recommended

• Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System by Art Smalley, Durward K. Sobek
  Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize. The A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyota’s successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the culture and mindset required for the implementation of the A3 system. In other words, A3 reports are not just an end product but are evidence of a powerful set of dynamics that is referred to as A3 Thinking.

Management Articles

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  The solution to this problem is to use Lean principles to streamline the processes and procedures used to do the experimental work. Eliminating complexity and wasted time and effort results in experimentation being speeded up and scientists having more time to do creative work.

• Why Google can’t build Instagram by Robert Scoble
  "1. Google can’t keep its teams small enough... 4. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t developed for small social projects. At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails. You’ve gotta build everything to deploy on its internal database “Big Table,” they call it. That wasn’t designed for small little dinky social projects. Engineers tell me it’s hard to develop for and not as productive as other tools that external developers get to use."

• Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient by John Allspaw
  "for complex systems: there is no root cause. ... Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes. ... In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is a way of visualizing invisible knowledge work activities such as software development, and limiting the quantity of work in progress. Limiting work-in-progress has several benefits: by avoiding over-burdening, quality is often significantly higher, while workers are happier and better motivated; delivery times are usually significantly shorter and far more predictable; priorities are often clear and prioritization decisions are simplified... Deming’s work is core to everything we do. I think his book, The New Economics, is a seminal work in management thinking... If I could have coffee with just one of these process and management science pioneers it would be Deming."

• Demystifying the Product Owner
  "This usually requires the product owner to lead product discovery, to help identify and describe requirements, and to ensure that the product backlog is ready for the next sprint planning meeting. It also means that the product owner has to engage in product planning, visioning and product road mapping, decide what functionality is provided by a release, carry out release planning, and answer questions from the team, review work results, and collaborate with customers, users and other stakeholders."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."

• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings by Jason Yip
  "It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity. ... Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

• Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle by John Hunter
  "The PDSA cycle is a learning cycle based on experiments. When using the PDSA cycle prediction of the results are important... The plan stage may well take 80% (or even more) of the effort on the first turn of the PDSA cycle in a new series. The Do stage may well take 80% of of the time - it usually doesn't take much effort (to just collect a bit of extra data) but it may take time for that data to be ready to collect."

• Agile Team Meets a Fixed Price Contract
  "We need to get back one more time to the point where we changed fixed scope into fixed budget. The 300 story points from the previous examples allows us to exchange the contents of the initial user story list. This is one of the most important aspects that we want to achieve with a fixed price contract done the agile way. Agile embraces change, and what we want to do is to streamline change management within the fixed price contract."

• A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management by Russell L. Ackoff
  Laws include: The more time managers spend trying to get rid of what they don.t want, the less likely they are to get what they do want; Managers who don.t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. Great, highly recommended.

• Lean Leadership Kaizen is Management by Mark Rosenthal
  "First they tried copying the benchmarked system on a small-scale test to deepen their understanding of what they had studied. Trying it on their parts surfaced differences that weren’t obvious at first, and they learned copying definitely wouldn’t work. Key: The reason they tried to copy was to learn more about it. This was a small-scale concept test, not an attempt at wholesale implementation... So, while an individual improvement task might take longer as people learn, in the end there is a multiplier effect as more and more people get better and better at making improvements. Sadly, it is really impossible to assign an ROI to that, so traditional management doesn’t allow for it..."

• Scrum-ban by Corey Ladas
  Great article on lean software development ideas: "One simple technique that brings us much closer to our kanban definition is to set a multitasking limit for individuals. You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted by John Hunter
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

• Eight guidelines for closing the knowing-doing gap by Jason Yip
  "Why before How: philosophy is important. Focus on Why (philosophy, general guidance) before How (detailed practices, behaviours, techniques) ... Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts. Ready, fire, aim. Act even if you haven't had the time to fully plan the action..."

• Actionable Metrics at Siemens Health Services
  "This case study details how a shift from traditional agile metrics (Story Points, Velocity) to actionable flow metrics (Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Throughput) reduced Cycle Times, increased quality, and increased overall predictability at Siemens Health Services. Moving to a continuous flow model augmented Siemens’ agility and explains how predictability is a systemic behavior that one has to manage by understanding and acting in accordance with the assumptions of Little’s Law and the impacts of resource utilization."

• How to be a program manager by Joel Spolsky
  "Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer's approach to designing technology with a po

• You are Solving the Wrong Problem
  "The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. ... When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again."

• 10 Steps to Successful Marketing using Agile and Lean Practices
  "Every 2 weeks, we hold an Iteration Planning meeting. Each team member has her own sticky note color, creates stories on those notes and manages her own prioritized backlog using T-shirt sizing to roughly estimate each story. ... As we keep running our iterations and fulfilling our commitments, we are always looking for ways to improve them."

• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham
  "There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. ... When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in."

• Approaching a Minimum Viable Product
  "The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you'll need enough money to answer them all."

• The Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck
  "In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Agile Software Development Made Easy! by Kelly Waters
  Blog by Kelly Waters agile development and agile project management.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Management and Leadership Quotes by John Hunter
  Quotes on management, business, leadership and many related topics: innovation, problems solving, change, statistics, planning, motivation, etc..

• Visual Management Blog
  Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue, from Argentina. The goal of the blog is to create a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management (the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work) applied to agile teams and agile project management.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Kanban Chronicle
  Purpose: To provide insight by sharing our experiences in adopting Kanban. Why: When we started, we found that the real examples were the most useful. We would like to add to that body of knowledge. We also wanted to share with our colleagues at work. Our aim: To provide a full lifecycle example from as many perspectives as possible... Why did we choose Kanban, what we read first, what we started with, how we adapted, what worked. by Andrew Walker

• Agile consulting
  Insights on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Flow by Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui.

• Dennis Stevens
  Blog on agile software development.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter by John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  George Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters. Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.