Personal Kanban transformed how we think about our own personal productivity. Why Limit Your WIP will transform how organizations and teams think about and manage their work. The tale in this book will hurt, because you'll have undoubtedly lived with the consequences of people being stretched too thin, work constantly blocked or in queue, projects chronically late, and people getting burned out... Gene Kim author of The Phoenix Project from the Foreword We are distracted. We are overburdened. We are unfocused. Our work suffers for this. Our companies suffer for this. We snatch failure from the jaws of success. Limiting WIP is the breakthrough strategy for starting less and completing more. Written by Jim Benson, author of the Shingo Research Award winning Personal Kanban, urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems, Why Limit WP is told by someone who has watched many projects be born, run into problems, and ultimately fail due to overburden. This short work is the third in the Modus Cooperandi MemeMachine series-which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The MemeMachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

Business runs on decisions. Business relies on estimates, plans, and projections - and we all know how accurate they tend to be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on perceived accuracy in estimation and planning. But what if the successes and failures of these projects were not based on the prowess of those making the plans? What if successes and failures were instead the result of a more complex set of events? What if our own cognitive biases - our own brains - were creating our inaccuracies, our poor assumptions, and our unreasonable expectations? Why Plans Fail directly addresses our ability to plan, to forecast, and to make decisions. Written by Jim Benson, author of the Shingo Research Award-winning Personal Kanban, urban planner, software developer, and business owner who has planned and built everything from small software projects, to houses, to urban freeway systems, Why Plans Fail is told by someone with much skin in the estimation and planning game. This short work is the first in the Modus Cooperandi MemeMachine series - which looks specifically at underlying issues that directly impact the success of teams, companies, and individuals. The Mememachine series is meant to start conversations and advance discussion.

Beyond Agile provides a broad but strong foundation for agile practices, but it doesn't stop there. After grounding us in solid theory, Beyond Agile takes us beyond the typical business book, diving deep into the ongoing practices of real teams doing real work. The stories bust many myths about agile and shares the human stories of real people and their struggles, trials and triumphs. Each story makes the complex and evolving topic of agile in the workplace engagingly clear and simple. Beyond Agile is a great, foundational and inspiring book. Dave Gray, Author of Gamestorming and The Connected Company Software development is knowledge work. Knowledge work is always an evolving art. Beyond Agile examines 10 companies, mostly in the tech world, but also in innovative automotive and business consulting, that have actively evolved their processes. Using tools from Lean, Agile and other schools of management thought, these companies have actively engaged in continuous improvement. These stories are stories of success, failure, and success again. These are real stories of real businesses creating real products. No story is devoid of mis-steps. No magic bullets, other than understanding, are provided. Collecting stories from several continents and countries, these case studies cover the global evolution of an entire industry. This book is a must-read for anyone involved with knowledge workers, software developers and IT shops that seem unmanageable.

Machines need to be productive. People need to be effective. Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value - not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For our legacy. Personal Kanban takes the same Lean principles from manufacturing that led the Japanese auto industry to become a global leader in quality, and applies them to individual and team work. Personal Kanban asks only that we visualize our work and limit our work-in-progress. Visualizing work allows us to transform our conceptual and threatening workload into an actionable, context-sensitive flow. Limiting our work-in-progress helps us complete what we start and understand the value of our choices. Combined, these two simple acts encourage us to improve the way we work and the way we make choices to balance our personal, professional, and social lives. Neither a prescription nor a plan, Personal Kanban provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.